QoS for internet services: done right

In this paper we argue that the best approach to providing Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to current Internet services is to use admission control and traffic shaping techniques at the entrance points of Internet hosting sites. We propose a black-box approach that does not require knowledge, instrumentation, or modification of the system (hardware and software) that implements the services provided by the site.We maintain that such a non-intrusive QoS solution achieves better resource utilization, has lower cost, and is more flexible than the current approaches of physical partitioning and hardware over-provisioning. Furthermore, we contend that our solution is easier to deploy, less complex to implement, and easier to maintain than more intrusive approaches which embed the QoS logic into the operating system, distributed middleware, or application code. We demonstrate empirically that despite being decoupled from the internal mechanisms implementing the site, a black-box approach provides effective response times and capacity guarantees.