Web scaling frameworks: A novel class of frameworks for scalable web services in cloud environments

摘要

The social web and huge growth of mobile smart devices dramatically increases the performance requirements for web services. State-of-the-art Web Application Frameworks (WAFs) do not offer complete scaling concepts with automatic resource-provisioning, elastic caching or guaranteed maximum response times. These functionalities, however, are supported by cloud computing and needed to scale an application to its demands. Components like proxies, load-balancers, distributed caches, queuing and messaging systems have been around for a long time and in each field relevant research exists. Nevertheless, to create a scalable web service it is seldom enough to deploy only one component. In this work we propose to combine those complementary components to a predictable, composed system. The proposed solution introduces a novel class of web frameworks called Web Scaling Frameworks (WSFs) that take over the scaling. The proposed mathematical model allows a universally applicable prediction of performance in the single-machine- and multi-machine scope. A prototypical implementation is created to empirically validate the mathematical model and demonstrates both the feasibility and increase of performance of a WSF. The results show that the application of a WSF can triple the requests handling capability of a single machine and additionally reduce the number of total machines by 44%.