Bookshelf

Companies move their applications and services to the cloud. A se vice level agreement (SLA) ensures the user high uptime and small response times from the data center provider. To be cost efficient, the service provider has to make trade-off calculations between SLA violation penalties and additional hardware. Especially peak times and co-scheduled applications influence the performance. By creating interferences with shared resources, peak times can be simulated. Each resource can be separately tested for potential SLA violations. An SLA violation means, that the system needs a higher resource limit, no violation means that the provider can reduce the resource.

The Resource Contention Tool is a workload suite with small workloads, that occupy one shared resource for a given amount of time and intensity. By occupying one shared resource, we create a resource contention with the service or application on the data center. The tool consists of carefully crafted workloads for CPU, memory, cache and storage, and can easily be extended with additional workloads. Changing the intensity of workloads allows to observe the sensitivity of applications towards resource interferences.