SALSA: QoS-aware load balancing for autonomous service brokering

The evolution towards “Software as a Service”, facilitated by various web service technologies, has led to applications composed of a number of service building blocks. These applications are dynamically composed by web service brokers, but rely critically on proper functioning of each of the composing subparts which is not entirely under control of the applications themselves. The problem at hand for the provider of the service is to guarantee non-functional requirements such as service access and performance to each customer. To this end, the service provider typically divides the load of incoming service requests across the available server infrastructure. In this paper we describe an adaptive load balancing strategy called SALSA (Simulated Annealing Load Spreading Algorithm), which is able to guarantee for different customer priorities, such as default and premium customers, that the services are handled in a given time and this without the need to adapt the servers executing the service logic themselves. It will be shown that by using SALSA, web service brokers are able to autonomously meet SLAs, without a priori over-dimensioning resources. This will be done by taking into account a real time view of the requests by measuring the Poisson arrival rates at that moment and selectively drop some requests from default customers. This way the web servers’ load is reduced in order to guarantee the service time for premium customers and provide best effort to default customers. We compared the results of SALSA with weighted round-robin (WRR), nowadays the most used load balancing strategy, and it was shown that the SALSA algorithm requires slightly more processing than WRR but is able to offer guarantees - contrary to WRR - by dynamically adapting its load balancing strategy.