aMAC: Automated admission control for internet services in virtualized environments

Web and e-commerce applications have become popular and are increasingly dominating the internet usage today. They frequently experience service degradation due to high volume of traffic originating from the customers. It is important to balance the available system resources to provide satisfactory quality of services without having an adverse effect on the system due to system overloading. Prior work in this area has looked at the admission control mechanism as a means to alleviate this problem. In our approach we develop a real-time autonomous multi-tier admission control (aMAC) that includes a controller which uses operating system performance metrics to detect and trigger overload condition and accept or reject requests coming to the web site. aMAC was tested in a distributed virtualized multi-tier e-commerce environment running industry standard benchmarks. Experimental results indicate that the system is able to maintain optimal performance while avoiding overload conditions.