A Tail-Tolerant Cloud API Wrapper
Qinghua Lu, Xiwei Xu, Len Bass, Liming Zhu, Weishan Zhang · IEEE Software · 2015
System operations (such as deployment, upgrade, and reconfiguration) for cloud applications are failure prone. These failures occur because these operations are performed through cloud APIs provided by cloud providers and because cloud APIs, in turn, are failure prone. Researchers have explored the characteristics of cloud APIs using Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) as a testbed and have devised mechanisms to improve cloud API performance. Specifically, mining the Amazon EC2 discussion forum revealed that 45 percent of complaints referred to cloud API timing failures. A series of experiments on cloud API timing behavior showed that cloud APIs have a long-tail distribution. A proposed cloud API wrapper implements mechanisms to avoid long tails. In experiments, this wrapper largely removed long tails, compared with the unwrapped APIs.