Cataclysm: Handling Extreme Overloads in Internet Services

In this paper we present Cataclysm, a comprehensive approach for handling extreme overloads in hosted Internet applications. The primary contribution of our work is to develop an overload control approach that brings together admission control, dynamic provisioning of platform resources, and adaptive degradation of QoS into one integrated system. Cataclysm provides several desirable features under overloads, such as preferential admission of important requests, the ability to handle diverse workloads, and revenue maximization at multiple time-scales via dynamic provisioning and size-based admission control. Cataclysm can transparently tradeoff the accuracy of its decision making with the intensity of the workload allowing it to handle incoming rates of several tens of thousands of requests/second. We implement a prototype Cataclysm hosting platform on a Linux cluster and demonstrate the benefits of our integrated approach using a variety of workloads.