QoE-Aware Auto-Scaling of Heterogeneous Containerized Services (and its application to Health Services)

Containerized service is currently a widely adopted solution to deploy services in the cloud. However, many companies offer a very diverse set of Web accessible services that are subjected to very distinctive workloads. Consequently, to correctly provision the right amount of resources for each of these services is a challenge. In this paper we propose the Autonomic ConTainerized Service Scaler (ACTS), an autonomic system able to horizontally and vertically scale a set of heterogeneous containerized services subjected to different workloads. The adaptation decisions depended on a set of high-level Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics centered on the services' end-user. We have applied ACTS to some of the digital services of the Shared Services of the Ministry of Health (SPMS) public company. The experimental results show that our solution is able to adequately adapt the configuration of each service, as a direct response to alterations on its workload.