ADVISE – A Framework for Evaluating Cloud Service Elasticity Behavior

Complex cloud services rely on different elasticity control processes to deal with dynamic requirement changes and workloads. However, enforcing an elasticity control process to a cloud service does not always lead to an optimal gain in terms of quality or cost, due to the complexity of service structures, deployment strategies, and underlying infrastructure dynamics. Therefore, being able, a priori, to estimate and evaluate the relation between cloud service elasticity behavior and elasticity control processes is crucial for runtime choices of appropriate elasticity control processes. In this paper we present ADVISE, a framework for estimating and evaluating cloud service elasticity behavior. ADVISE gathers service structure, deployment, service runtime, control processes, and cloud infrastructure information. Based on this information, ADVISE utilizes clustering techniques to identify cloud elasticity behavior produced by elasticity control. Our experiments show that ADVISE can estimate the expected elasticity behavior, in time, for different cloud services thus being a useful tool to elasticity controllers for improving the quality of runtime elasticity control decisions.