Towards Workload-aware Cloud Efficiency: A Large-scale Empirical Study of Cloud Workload Characteristics

  • Anjaly Parayil
  • , Jue Zhang
  • , Xiaoting Qin
  • , Íñigo Goiri
  • , Lexiang Huang
  • , Timothy Zhu
  • , Chetan Bansal

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Cloud providers introduce features and optimizations to improve efficiency and reliability, such as Spot VMs, Harvest VMs, oversubscription, and auto-scaling. To use these effectively, it's important to understand workload characteristics. However, workload characterization can be complex and difficult to scale manually due to multiple signals involved. In this study, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study of first-party workloads at Microsoft to understand their characteristics. Through this empirical study, we aim to answer the following questions: (1) What are the critical workload characteristics that impact efficiency and reliability on cloud platforms? (2) How do these characteristics vary across different workloads? (3) How can cloud platforms leverage these insights to efficiently characterize all workloads at scale? This study provides a deeper understanding of workload characteristics and their impact on cloud performance, which can aid in optimizing cloud services and identifies potential areas for future research.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationICPE 2025 - Proceedings of the 16th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages136-146
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9798400710735
DOIs
StatePublished - May 5 2025
Event16th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance, ICPE 2025 - Toronto, Canada
Duration: May 5 2025May 9 2025

Publication series

NameICPE 2025 - Proceedings of the 16th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance

Conference

Conference16th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance, ICPE 2025
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityToronto
Period5/5/255/9/25

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Software

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