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Yodea: Workload Pattern Assessment Tool for Cloud Migration

Conference Paper · December 2018

DOI: 10.1109/CloudCom2018.2018.00019

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 2018 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom)

Yodea: Workload Pattern Assessment Tool for

Cloud Migration
Rukma Talwadker Cijo George*
NetApp Inc. (rukma@netapp.com) cijogeorge.in@gmail.com

Abstract—As the news around cloud repatriations gets real,

many cloud technologists associate them with poor understanding
of the applications and their usage patterns by the enterprises.
Our solution, Yodea, is a tool cum methodology to analyze work-
load patterns in the light of cloud suitability. We bring forward
compute patterns which can benefit from cloud economics with
on-demand compute scaling. Yodea further ranks workloads in
terms of their cloud suitability on the basis of these metrics. After
the fact analysis of storage workloads for a customer install-base,
features 38% of the “already in cloud” volumes in the top 100
ranked list by Yodea.
Index Terms—cloud migration, workload analysis, pattern
extraction, time series decomposition, workload agility Fig. 1: Cloud workload types: (source:
www.iamondemand.com/blog/5-key-essentials-of-cloud-
I. I NTRODUCTION workloads-migration/)
A. Background and Motivation
CIO’s are keen on moving to the cloud primarily because of
performance bottlenecks prior to earmarking the applications
two reasons; 1) cost efficiency: cloud offers a pay-as-you-go
for the cloud. For instance, at peak demand, scaling the
model which has the premise to beat the cost of ownership
compute capacity by spinning up additional VM’s in the cloud
of an on premise infrastructure and 2) agility: incentivizing
might just not work if the underlying shared storage is the
on the endless and quick capacity on demand. However, a
bottleneck [2]. Yodea implements a complete workflow (from
recent study by 451 Research [3] mentions that over two-
data collection, to workload pattern classification, to cloud
thirds of customers hosting one or more workloads in the
recommendations) to analyze workloads in the light of these
public cloud are repatriating back to a private or on premises
four patterns. The analysis ranks the observed workloads with
cloud or are planning to do so within a year. Dropbox,
quantitative as well as visual illustrations to help CIO take an
TapJoy being a couple of the known examples.The cloud
informed decision.
technologists attribute these failures primarily to: 1) inability
1) Yodea Criteria: High Growth: If the read and write
to change legacy processes, and 2) limited understanding of
operations show a positive linear or an exponential trend,
the applications, processes and the usage patterns.
indicates that over a period of time the demand has been
Today workload analysis mostly happens at a coarser gran-
increasing. This presents an opportunity with cloud agility;
ularity, considering only the recent trends in the workload.
expand capacity on demand. For storage, one needs to further
The capability of identifying the right workloads taking into
analyse if the storage used capacity is also changing. If the
consideration their fine granular patterns and back in time
used capacity is on the rise, efficient partitioning of the data
trends is heavily sought after. Premise of Yodea is to provide
with compute scale out can be considered. On the other hand,
such a capability in the form of a self-help tool, which also
if the data is always overwritten with used capacity remaining
recommends workloads which can benefit from the dynamic
the same, this increasing trend may not be good for the cloud
compute scaling available in the cloud and meet the expected
from the storage perspective. One would need a storage re-
ROI.
configuration prior to the shift.
B. How can Yodea Help? On-Off: Workload pattern which shows an On and Off at
[1] recommends a few compute patterns being good for the storage reflects well on the actual application compute
the cloud for incentivising on agility and economics. These pattern too. Quite unlikely the application would be serving
patterns are illustrated in Figure 1 with the compute demand all of its data from a hot cache for the entire Off period of the
on the y-axis and the time on the x-axis. We believe that, storage, which could be as large as 10-12 hours in a day. For
only analyzing the compute patterns is not enough, one must such cases, a suitable cloud option can be considered (like
also analyze the corresponding storage workload patterns for shutting down the infrastructure during “Off” period), after
validating a similar trend for the compute.
*This work was done while the author was with NetApp A-Periodic and Periodic bursting: Many applications

978-1-5386-7899-2/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 17

DOI 10.1109/CloudCom2018.2018.00019

Fig. 2: Read counter time series and its decomposed con-
stituents
(especially web apps) are notorious for an unpredictable and
dynamic demand spikes, referred to as the a-periodic burst. In
the cloud, there is an opportunity to capitalize on this load
and monetize it by dynamic compute scale up and down.
Also, if an application exhibits a predictable demand rise,
several orders of magnitude from an average demand, cloud
presents a unique opportunity too. In both these cases, an over-
provisioned on premise (CAPEX) loses to a dynamically sized
cloud instance (OPEX).
The periodic and a-periodic bursts of compute may not
mirror read and write demands at the storage. However,
repeating the same analysis helps in avoiding a situation where
compute scale out is bottlenecked by the storage performance.
Finally, this paper is not a detailed survey of the workload
patterns suitable for the cloud. Yodea only covers the patterns
mentioned in Figure 1.
C. Yodea Contributions
1) Yodea is a self-help tool which offers an automated
assessment of applications for cloud compute based on
the workload patterns.
2) Yodea offers simple and effective statistical metrics over
counter time series for workload classification. More
importantly these metrics do not require any manual
tuning or workload specific knowledge.
3) These metrics are generic and are applicable to counter
data at the storage as well as the compute. The technique
works for any granularity of the counter data.
II. A PPROACH
A. Time Series Decomposition
Yodea uses total number of 4KB read and write operations
per unit of time (can be a second/minute or an hour) over a
period of time as a representative of a workload. This counter
data gathered at the compute or the storage layer is our input
time series. Counter data is interpolated to handle missing
values and then decomposed for metric calculations. Time
series decomposition is a statistical approach to deconstructing
a time series into its constituents as discussed in [5].
Figure 2 shows an example of counter time series for a
randomly chosen storage workload. The “raw” series is the
actual observed time series. The y axis indicates the values
18
Fig. 3: Time series characteristics
of the counter and the x axis denotes the time. Time series
decomposition produces three distinct constituents: the trend,
the seasonal and the residual.
Trend (T): This component reflects the progression of the
data. If there is a steady increase or decrease in the values of
the data, the trend progression will reflect this behaviour. We
only consider the additive trend.
Seasonal (S): Any predictably repeating behaviour in the
time series is captured by the seasonal constituent. Residual,
remainder or the noise (R): Any randomly occurring pattern
of counter values is accounted into the residual constituent.
In an additive decomposition, the decomposed time series
can be reconstructed as: raw = T + S + R. Each of these
constituents are also time series.
B. The Constituents and the Metrics
We discuss metrics which are used by Yodea to score each
workload pattern along the following three categories: High
growth, Periodic and A-Periodic. Identifying On and Off is
relatively simpler and we do not discuss it in this paper further.
High Growth: We begin with finding a linear trend. We
perform a simple line fitting (linear regression) on the trend
component. The slope of the line indicates the trend. If the
slope is negative, it indicates a downtrend. A zero-valued slope
indicates no trend.
Periodic Burst: Periodic bursts are predictable. These bursts
come from the workload patterns which repeat at regular
intervals. Hence, periodic burst scores are extracted from the
seasonal constituent.
A-periodic Burst: A-periodic bursts are random in their
occurrence. There is no regularity in their arrival pattern. Any
dynamic, non-deterministic occurrence of a burst would be
reflected in the residual constituent.
1) Intuition Behind Burst Scoring Metrics: Figure 3 depicts
the characteristics of a raw time series. Prior to introducing
the metrics, we briefly discuss the various characteristics of a
burst:
Burst: indicates increase in the value of a counter by an order
of magnitude higher than the mean value of the series. Though
the burst starts and ends gradually, only when the value of the
counter exceeds the threshold value, the beginning of a burst
is assumed. Yodea configures threshold to be, one standard
deviation from the mean.
The burst inter-arrival time: denotes the time between end
of a burst and the start of the subsequent burst.
The peak or the amplitude: indicates the highest value of
the counter during the burst.
The width or the duration: indicates the time along the x
axis between the start and the end of the burst. Now, we define
the metrics for determining the periodic and a-periodic burst
scores. These metrics are applied independently on both the
seasonal and the residual constituents of both the counter types
(read, write) to obtain the respective scores.
2) The Metrics: Peak to mean (PtM): The amplitude of
the burst can digress the burst score in the cases where a)
peak is not appearing frequently (peak inter-arrival time being
high); b) peak appears but doesn’t last longer (width of the
peak). Yodea considers the ratio of maximum observed value
of the burst to the mean of the counter series as the metric.
Coefficient of Variation (CV): This metric establishes the
notion of a relative variation. CV is the ratio of standard
deviation to the mean of the time series. This way, the two
time series with distinct mean and peak values can be directly
compared.
Burst Percentage (Bp): This metric denotes the amount of
time spent in a burst. This further separates the two candidate
workloads on the basis of the overall spread of the bursts.
As the burst percentage increases, the ratio of peak to mean
reduces. The two metrics therefore balance the overall score.
Burst Inter-arrival time (BIaT): This metric favours work-
loads where the bursts are well separated out vs. the cases
where the bursts and non-bursts are localized. In both these
cases the, PtM and Bp would favour both, and BIaT metric
would bring in the differentiation.
The final score is a combination of these four metrics and is
calculated for both, the seasonal and the residual constituents.
3) The Score: Putting it All Together: Assume that there
are a total of N workloads which are under Yodea evaluation.
Each of the four metrics are computed independently for the
seasonal and the residual constituents. Yodea also computes
the trend metrics via regression line fitting.
Yodea normalizes each of the four metric values by the max-
imum (max) value of the corresponding metric from workloads
under evaluation. When normalizing the two counter types are
considered separately. For example, normalized PtM value for
a seasonal component (normalized P tM periodici ) for a
workload i is:
P tM periodici
max(P tM periodici )f or i f rom 1 to N
Similar transformation is applied to other metrics as well.
The respective normalized metric values are between 0 and
1. This normalization by max is a conscious decision. There
is no absolute measure of fitness for the cloud. For an
enterprise given the CIO budget, only a few applications can
be migrated to the cloud. Relative ranking helps to break
the ties. The final periodic burst score for a workload i is
calculated as:
periodic burst scorei = normalized P tM periodici +
normalized CV periodici + normalized Bp periodici +
normalized BIaT periodici
19
(a)
(b)
Fig. 4: Two instances of periodic burst scores, occasional
predictive bursts ranked higher than constant low amplitude
bursts
a − periodic burst scorei is computed similarly. The
periodic and a-periodic burst scores are values between 0 and
4 whereas the trend score is between 0 and 1.
C. Finding the Dominant Pattern
It is quite unlikely that a given raw counter time series
exhibits a trend, a periodic as well as an a-periodic burst
pattern. For e.g. in Figure 2, the significant portion of the
raw counter time series seems to be coming from the seasonal
component. To obtain that knowledge, Yodea, extracts the most
dominant dimension for the raw counter time series (read,
write). Using the variance (σ 2 ) calculation over the respective
time series, weights of the constituents are obtained. For
example, periodic burst score weighti can be calculated
as:
periodic burst variancei
raw time series variancei
Variance for the trend and the a-periodic scores are sim-
ilarly calculated. The constituent with the highest weight is
considered dominant for the corresponding raw time series.
D. Workload Ranking
Each workload is tagged with two scores, one for each of
the counter types. Each score corresponds to its respective
dominant component. Workloads are ranked on a counter type
in the descending order of the score. The workload with
highest score is considered to be most suitable for the cloud
and for a particular pattern that it is best described for. We
presently do not have a way to combine the read and write
scores.
E. Related Work
Yodea approach has been inspired from [5]. From the tech-
nique perspective, the nearest work to ours is [6]. The approach
 (a)
(b)
Fig. 5: Two instances of a-periodic burst scores, infrequent
high bursts are scored higher than not-so frequent low ampli-
tude bursts
claims to provide an effective way to increase utilization in
the data centers. Our work differs and also complements this
work in many ways, a couple being: 1) The mentioned paper
forecasts trends as it observes the facts for a limited period
of time whereas Yodea works on long term trends. 2) Yodea
comes up with workload rankings based on patterns. These
metrics are complementary and can be directly fed to the tool
discussed in [6].
III. VALIDATION
Our preliminary analysis is based on the read counter data
available at the storage volume level which can be termed as
a workload. Our goal is to first verify the pattern classification
technique of Yodea. A volume is a logical storage container.
Multiple volumes could be mapped to a single application. For
the purpose of validation, we selected about 4,565 volumes
belonging to a single customer. For each volume, the total
number of 4KB reads done per hour over 12 weeks from 1st
of September 2017 was considered as a workload. This data
was obtained via NetApp® AutoSupport® [4].
A. Periodic Bursts
Volume in Figure 4a scores much higher than the one in
Figure 4b though both volumes are dominated by periodic
bursts. Reason being twofold: 1) higher burst amplitude when
compared with the burst threshold and; 2) burst periods are
well spread out and distinct in Figure 4a. Manual analysis of
the volume in Figure 4a indicated that, this was an oracleTM
database’s data volume which might be subjected to periodic
application bursts. The same analysis has to be repeated on
the compute demand to re-confirm the pattern.
20
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Fig. 6: Top trend pattern for a datalake workload
B. A-Periodic Bursts
Figures 5a and 5b, represent the respective high and low
scored instances of volumes in a-periodic burst category for
read operations. Infrequent high amplitude bursts are scored
higher than not-so frequent low amplitude bursts. Further
analysis of the volume in Figure 5a, revealed that this volume
hosted a media application which had unpredictable active
peaks. A number of other volume’s dominant scores (were
also a-periodic) matched closely with this volume and were
also a part of the same media application.
C. Trend/High Growth
Figure 6 shows a volume which scored much higher on the
trend metric with respect to the other volumes. While more
than 98% of the other volumes indicated a flat trend. Drill
down analysis revealed that this volume was a part of the
customer’s datalake cluster where the growth pattern is trivial.
In all the above three cases, Yodea analysis has to be
repeated on the compute pattern as well to confirm the oppor-
tunity and rule out the need for better storage configuration.
Also, the volumes under comparison in Figures 4b and 5b
were ranked much lower and were not recommended for the
cloud.
IV. C ONCLUSION AND F UTURE W ORK
Paper motivates the need for workload pattern analysis
as one of the precursor to earmarking applications for the
cloud. Yodea defines statistical metrics over time series data
to extract workload pattern properties. It classifies workloads
into patterns, and recommends the top ranked as cloud fit. We
would like to extend our present validation to compute patterns
and build an end-to-end recommender tool for self-help.
R EFERENCES
[1] 5 key essentials of cloud workloads migration.
http://www.iamondemand.com/blog/5-key-essentials-of-cloud-workloads-
migration/.
[2] Cloud management blog. https://www.rightscale.com/blog/enterprise-
cloud-strategies/identifying-workloads-cloud.
[3] Insight in the age of digital disruption. https://451research.com/.
[4] NetApp, inc. proactive health management with AutoSupport. http:
//media.netapp.com/documents/wp-7027.pdf.
[5] R. B. Cleveland, W. S. Cleveland, J. McRae, and I. Terpenning. Stl:
A seasonal-trend decomposition procedure based on loess. Journal of
Official Statistics, pages 3–73, 1990.
[6] Y. Zhang, G. Prekas, G. M. Fumarola, M. Fontoura, I. Goiri, and
R. Bianchini. History-based harvesting of spare cycles and storage
in large-scale datacenters. In 12th USENIX Symposium on Operating
Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 16).