A scalable application placement controller for enterprise data centers

Given a set of machines and a set of Web applications with dynamically changing demands, an online application placement controller decides how many instances to run for each application and where to put them, while observing all kinds of resource constraints. This NP hard problem has real usage in commercial middleware products. Existing approximation algorithms for this problem can scale to at most a few hundred machines, and may produce placement solutions that are far from optimal when system resources are tight. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that can produce within 30 seconds high-quality solutions for hard placement problems with thousands of machines and thousands of applications. This scalability is crucial for dynamic resource provisioning in large-scale enterprise data centers. Our algorithm allows multiple applications to share a single machine, and strives to maximize the total satisfied application demand, to minimize the number of application starts and stops, and to balance the load across machines. Compared with existing state-of-the-art algorithms, for systems with 100 machines or less, our algorithm is up to 134 times faster, reduces application starts and stops by up to 97%, and produces placement solutions that satisfy up to 25% more application demands. Our algorithm has been implemented and adopted in a leading commercial middleware product for managing the performance of Web applications.