Control-Based Load-Balancing Techniques: Analysis and Performance Evaluation via a Randomized Optimization Approach

Cloud applications are often subject to unexpected events like flashcrowds and hardware failures. Users that expect a predictable behavior may abandon an unresponsive application when these events occur. Researchers and engineers addressed this problem on two separate fronts: first, they introduced replicas – copies of the application with the same functionality – for redundancy and scalability; second, they added a self-adaptive feature called brownout inside cloud applications to bound response times by modulating user experience. The presence of multiple replicas requires a dedicated component to direct incoming traffic: a load-balancer.