Workloads in Cloud Computing

In computer science, according to Wikipedia, abstraction is a “mechanism to reduce and factor out details so that one can focus on a few concepts at a time.”

When you hear about abstraction in the context of virtualization-based IaaS cloud computing, the most well known abstraction is computing resources themselves (encapsulation is at play here as well). You don’t need to know exact hardware on which your instance is running, or exact network setup - you only need to be able to treat your compute instances as nearly identical units that respond to certain set of signals in a predictable way.

With emergence of multiple IaaS clouds however, there is a second abstraction that is going to play a big role - workload.

Workload is an abstraction of the actual work that your instance or a set of instances are going to perform. Running a web server or a web server farm, or being a Hadoop data node - these are all valid workloads. I am treating a workload as an abstraction, because I intentionally leave out a huge component - exact way how work in a given workload gets mapped to resources offered by a given cloud. When speaking in terms of workloads, I want to focus on what needs to be done, as opposed to how it’s going to be done in the context of a particular cloud (remember that from technical architecture perspective, clouds are far from identical).

For example, “run this blog for 1 year, for up to 100 visitors a day” is a what (workload), while “run this blog on m1.small EC2 instance in us-east-1 for 1 year” or “run this blog on Terremark instance with 1 VPU and 1 GB of RAM for 1 year” are a how (for lack of a better word, I am going to call them deployments).

I think such an abstraction is very helpful. Running this blog may take 1 small instance in one cloud, half of a small instance in another, a third of an instance plus a dedicated load balancer in third. As you can see, once you map a workload to a set of compute, storage and network resources offered by one cloud, you can no longer move it to another cloud - your deployments are non-transferable from one cloud to another. Workloads here serve as transferable equivalents of your cloud deployments.

Secondly, workloads by themselves may have properties or attributes that could dictate where workload can or can’t run. This justifies existence of a workload as a separate entity - it is in theory possible to construct a workload for which no deployment can exist in any of the clouds available today.

There are many examples what kind of attributes a workload may possess. A workload may have a compliance attribute, which says that this workload must run in an environment with a certain certification. Another attribute may be a geo location requirement, whereas it must run within a certain geographic region for a legal reason.

A workload may be time-bound (“runs for 5 hours”) or time-unbound. A workload may have a specific start time or flexible start time, in which case it may have a hard stop time (for example, must finish by a certain time in the future). It can be interruptable or must run without interruptions.

A workload may have a certain lower limit of resources that it needs, expressed in work-independent form. For example, serving Wordpress blog for 1 visitor a day as opposed to 100 visitors an hour are two very distinct workloads (note that workloads are different, while the application inside the workload is the same). The latter will certainly end up consuming more resources than the former.

Workload may have a budget associated with it, it may have redundancy requirements. It may require a certain OS or distribution. It may require a certain feature (for example, persistent disk or non-private IP address directly attached to eth0). It may require a certain minimal access speed to some data source (for example, if my data are in S3 on the East coast, I may want my workload to run somewhere near). Each requirement is a restriction - the more requirements a workload has, the fewer clouds can potentially run it.

Conclusion

The answer to the question “Where is the best place to run this task?” used to be treated as a binary decision (“on premises” vs “in the cloud”) but not any more - because there are many different and incompatible implementations of the latter. Looking at your tasks via workloads/deployments prism may open new horizons for computing mobility. There is a saying “select the right tool for the job.” It can be now extended to “select the right tool and the right location for the job.”

If you like the idea of cloud computing workloads, you may find this post by James Urquhart interesting as well.

P.S. Believe it or not, this is my 100th post on this blog. Not bad. Hope at least some of you enjoy reading my posts as much as I enjoy writing them.

Categories: cloud-computing |

Comments (1)

Sergey Shepelev // 02 Mar 2010

Yup, thank you for interesting posts. Write another hundred! :)