Understanding performance interference in multi-tenant cloud databases and web applications

Abstract

The number of e-commerce customers and database services in cloud computing platforms has grown increasingly, leading providers to adopt resource-sharing solutions to meet growing demand for infrastructure resources, such as processing and storage. Consolidating database applications has become arguably a de-facto solution to support a large number of customers/tenants at low infrastructure costs. However, the friction generated in shared hardwares (resource contention) is converted to performance interference, which is felt by tenants' database applications running on upper layers (VMs). Hence, there is a real concern on how to manage and prevent multi-tenant cloud databases from performance interferences sourced by either resource contention or isolation flaws. In this paper, we analyzed the performance interference tolerated by multi-tenant e-commerce cloud databases in resource-sharing infrastructures. We claimed that multiple-different workloads (e.g. memory-/CPU-intensive, and e-commerce applications) might be consolidated with database systems to minimize performance interference and increase resource-efficiency.