Towards Interference-Aware Dynamic Scheduling in Virtualized Environments.

Our previous work shows that multiple applications contending for shared resources in virtualized environments are susceptible to cross-application interference, which can lead to significant performance degradation and consequently an increase in the number of broken SLAs. Nevertheless, state of the art in resource scheduling in virtualized environments still relies mainly on resource capacity, adopting heuristics such as bin packing, overlooking this source of overhead. However, in recent years interference-aware scheduling has gained traction, with the investigation of ways to classify applications regarding their interference levels and the proposal of static cost models and policies for scheduling co-hosted cloud applications. Preliminary results in this area already show a considerable improvement on resource usage and in the reduction of broken SLAs, but we strongly believe that there are still opportunities for improvement in the areas of application classification and pro-active dynamic scheduling strategies. This paper presents the state of the art in interference-aware scheduling for virtualized environments and the challenges and advantages of a dynamic scheme.