Formal and Empirical Study of Metadata-Based Profiling for Resource Management in the Computing Continuum

Abstract: We present and formalize a general approach for profiling workload by leveraging only a priori available static metadata to supply appropriate resource needs. Understanding the requirements and characteristics of a workload's runtime is essential. Profiles are essential for the platform (or infrastructure) provider because they want to ensure that Service Level Agreements and their objectives (SLOs) are fulfilled and, at the same time, avoid allocating too many resources to the workload. When the infrastructure to manage is the computing continuum (i.e., from IoT to Edge to Cloud nodes), there is a big problem of placement and tradeoff or distribution and performance. Still, existing techniques either rely on static predictions or runtime profiling, which are proven to deliver poor performance in runtime environments or require laborious mechanisms to produce fast and reliable evaluations. We want to propose a new approach for it. Our profile combines the information from past execution traces with the related workload metadata, equipping an infrastructure orchestrator with a fast and precise association of newly submitted workloads. We differentiate from previous works because we extract the profile group metadata saliency from the groups generated by grouping similar runtime behavior. We first formalize its functioning and its main components. Subsequently, we implement and empirically analyze our proposed technique on two public data sources: Alibaba cloud machine learning workloads and Google cluster data. Despite relying on partially anonymized or obscured information, the approach provides accurate estimates of workload runtime behavior in real-time.