SPEEDL - A Declarative Event-Based Language to Define the Scaling Behavior of Cloud Applications

Abstract

Contemporary cloud providers offer out-of-the-box auto-scaling solutions. However, defining a non-trivial scaling behavior that goes beyond the feature set provided by existing solutions is still challenging. In this paper we present SPEEDL, a declarative and extensible domain-specific language that simplifies the creation of elastic scaling behavior on top of IaaS clouds. SPEEDL simplifies the creation of event-driven policies for resource management (How many resources, and what resource types, are needed?), as well as task mapping (Which tasks should be handled by which resources?). Based on a dataset of real-life scaling policies, we demonstrate that SPEEDL can cover most scaling behaviors real-life developers want to express, and that the resulting SPEEDL policies are at the same time substantially more compact, easier to read, and less error-prone than the same behavior expressed via a general-purpose programming language.