Title
sPARE: Partial Replication for Multi-Tier Applications in the Cloud
Abstract
Offering consistent low latency remains a key challenge for distributed applications, especially when deployed on the cloud where virtual machines (VMs) suffer from capacity variability caused by co-located tenants. Replicating redundant requests was shown to be an effective mechanism to defend application performance from high capacity variability. While the prior art centers on single-tier systems, it still remains an open question how to design replication strategies for distributed multi-tier systems. In this paper, we design a first of its kind PArtial REplication system, sPARE, that replicates and dispatches read-only workloads for distributed multi-tier web applications. The two key components of sPARE are (i) the variability-aware replicator that coordinates the replication levels on all tiers via an iterative searching algorithm, and (ii) the replication-aware arbiter that uses a novel token-based arbitration algorithm (TAD) to dispatch requests in each tier. We evaluate sPARE on web serving and searching applications, i.e., MediaWiki and Solr, the former deployed on our private cloud and the latter on Amazon EC2. Our results based on various interference patterns and traffic loads show that sPARE is able to improve the tail latency of MediaWiki and Solr by a factor of almost 2.7x and 2.9x, respectively.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/TSC.2017.2780845
IEEE Transactions on Services Computing
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Cloud,replication,tail latency,models,load balancing
Journal
14
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
1939-1374
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Robert Birke114317.83
Juan F. Pérez210611.80
Zhan Qiu3394.51
Mathias Borkqvist400.34
Lydia Y. Chen543252.24