Distributed Resource Management Across Process Boundaries

Abstract

Multi-tenant distributed systems composed of small services, such as Service-oriented Architectures (SOAs) and Micro-services, raise new challenges in attaining high performance and efficient resource utilization. In these systems, a request execution spans tens to thousands of processes, and the execution paths and resource demands on different services are generally not known when a request first enters the system. In this paper, we highlight the fundamental challenges of regulating load and scheduling in SOAs while meeting end-to-end performance objectives on metrics of concern to both tenants and operators. We design Wisp, a framework for building SOAs that transparently adapts rate limiters and request schedulers system-wide according to operator policies to satisfy end-to-end goals while responding to changing system conditions. In evaluations against production as well as synthetic workloads, Wisp successfully enforces a range of end-to-end performance objectives, such as reducing average latencies, meeting deadlines, providing fairness and isolation, and avoiding system overload.