Profiling and Predicting Application Performance on the Cloud

Cloud providers continue to expand and diversify their collection of leasable resources to meet the needs of an increasingly wide range of applications. While this flexibility is a key benefit of the cloud, it also creates a complex landscape in which users are faced with many resource choices for a given application. Suboptimal selections can both degrade performance and increase costs. Given the rapidly evolving pool of resources, it is infeasible for users alone to select instance types; instead, automated methods are needed to simplify and guide resource provisioning. Here we present a method for the automatic prediction of application performance on arbitrary cloud instances. We combine offline and online profiling approaches, using historical data gathered from non-cloud environments and targeted profiling runs on cloud environments to create a composite application model that can predict run times on a given cloud instance type for a given input data size. We demonstrate average error of 17.2% across nine applications used in production bioinformatics workflows. Finally, we evaluate an experiment design approach to explore the trade-off between the cost of profiling and the accuracy of our models. Using this approach, with no prior knowledge, we show that using 4 selectively chosen experiments we can achieve performance within 30% of a model trained using all instance types.