Service Load Balancing with Autonomic Servers: Reversing the Decision Making Process

Load balancing faces new challenges in the framework of autonomic servers deployed in data centers. With traditional push-based strategies, the authoritative decision is made by the load balancer, which decides to which server the requests are forwarded. However, the autonomy of servers is often incompatible with these strategies, as they may accept or refuse to process a request on a voluntary basis. We present in this paper the benefits and limits of a pull-based load balancing strategy for transferring the authority from the load balancer to the autonomic servers. We describe the underlying functional architecture with two different schemes and quantify the performances through an extensive set of experiments.