K8-Scalar

K8-Scalar: a workbench to compare autoscalers for container-orchestrated database clusters

by Wito Delnat, Eddy Truyen, Ansar Rafique, Dimitri Van Landuyt, and Wouter Joosen

Abstract

This artifact is an easy-to-use and extensible workbench exemplar, named K8-Scalar, which allows researchers to implement and evaluate different self-adaptive approaches to autoscaling container-orchestrated services. The workbench is based on Docker, a popular technology for easing the deployment of containerized software that also has been positioned as an enabler for reproducible research. The workbench also relies on a container orchestration framework: Kubernetes (K8s), the de-facto industry standard for orchestration and monitoring of elastically scalable container-based services. Finally, it integrates and extends Scalar, a generic testbed for evaluating the scalability of large-scale systems with support for evaluating the performance of autoscalers for database clusters. The associated scholarly paper presents (i) the architecture and implementation of K8-Scalar and how a particular autoscaler can be plugged in, (ii) sketches the design of a Riemann-based autoscaler for database clusters, (iii) illustrates how to design, setup and analyze a series of experiments to configure and evaluate the performance of this autoscaler for a particular database (i.e., Cassandra) and a particular workload type, (iv) and validates the effectiveness of K8-scalar as a workbench for accurately comparing the performance of different auto-scaling strategies. Future work includes extending K8-Scalar with an improved research data management repository.

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Download the K8-Scalar artifact and paper from the Dagstuhl Artifacts Series:

K8-Scalar