As company operations become increasingly digitized, the demand to process data efficiently and cost-effectively has been ever-growing. More and more companies are therefore moving their workloads off of dedicated, silo-ed clusters in favor of more cost-efficient, shared data infrastructures, e.g., public and private clouds. These shared data infrastructures are often deployed on highly heterogeneous servers, are multi-tenant with server resources shared across multiple organizations, and serve widely diverse workloads ranging from batch analytics jobs to consumer-facing services with stringent service level objectives (SLOs). Both users and operators of such shared data infrastructures strive to optimize for value. Users look to complete their tasks in an efficient and timely manner without having to pay large amounts of money, while operators seek to satisfy the demands of their customers to increase adoption and lower turnover, all the while without sacrificing cluster operation costs and overhead.

This dissertation presents two case studies that allows users to improve value- attainment when running their workloads in shared data infrastructures in Tributary and Stratus. Tributary is an elastic control system that embraces the uncertain nature of transient cloud resources to manage elastic long-running services with latency SLOs more robustly and more cost-effectively. Stratus is a cluster scheduler specialized for orchestrating batch job execution on virtual clusters focusing primarily on dollar cost considerations: since resources in virtual clusters are charged-for while allocated,Stratus aggressively packs tasks onto machines, guided by job run time estimates, such that allocated resources remain highly utilized.

This dissertation presents two more case studies that allow cluster operators to attain value in Wing and Talon. Inter-job dependencies pervade today's shared data infrastructures, yet are often invisible to cluster schedulers. The Wing dependency profiler analyzes job and data provenance logs to find hidden inter-job dependencies, characterizes them, and provides improved guidance to cluster schedulers and workflow managers to help users attain more value. Talon is one such workflow manager that uses information provided by Wing to load-shift batch analytics jobs to off-peak hours, thereby allowing cluster operators to save on infrastructure operation costs through reduced machines managed and usage of lower-cost, transient resources from the cloud.

154 pages

Thesis Committee:
Gregory R. Ganger (Chair)
Phillip B. Gibbons
George Amvrosiadis
Carlo Curino (Microsoft)

Srinivasan Seshan, Head, Computer Science Department
Martial Hebert, Dean, School of Computer Science

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