2018/04/15 by Salman Taherizadeh, Vlado Stankovski · 92 citations
Computer Science · #Cloud Computing and Resource Management #Cloud computing #Computer network #Computer science #Container (type theory) #Distributed and Parallel Computing Systems #Distributed computing #IoT and Edge/Fog Computing #Operating system #Orchestration #Real-time computing #Resource (disambiguation) #Scaling #Workload
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxy043
published in The Computer Journal 62(2), 174-197 (Oxford University Press)
openalex publication_date 2018/04/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Container-based cloud applications require sophisticated auto-scaling methods in order to operate under different workload conditions. The choice of an auto-scaling method may significantly affect important service quality parameters, such as response time and resource utilization. Current container orchestration systems such as Kubernetes and cloud providers such as Amazon EC2 employ auto-scaling rules with static thresholds and rely mainly on infrastructure-related monitoring data, such as CPU and memory utilization. This paper presents a new dynamic multi-level (DM) auto-scaling method with dynamically changing thresholds, which uses not only infrastructure, but also application-level monitoring data. The new method is compared with seven existing autoscaling methods in different synthetic and real-world workload scenarios. Based on experimental results, all eight auto-scaling methods are compared according to the response time and the number of instantiated containers. The results show that the proposed DM method has better overall performance under varied amount of workloads than the other auto-scaling methods. Due to satisfactory results, the proposed DM method is implemented in the SWITCH software engineering system for time-critical cloud applications.