PseudoApp: Performance prediction for application migration to cloud

To migrate an existing application to cloud, a user needs to estimate and compare the performance and resource consumption of the application running in different clouds, in order to select the best service provider and the right virtual machine size. However, it is prohibitively expensive to install a complex application in multiple new environments solely for the purpose of performance benchmarking. Performance modeling is more practical but the accuracy is limited by system factors that are hard to model. We propose a new technique called PseudoApp to address these challenges. Our solution creates a pseudo-application to mimic the resource consumption of a real application. A pseudo-application runs the same set of distributed components and executes the same sequence of system calls as those of the real application. By benchmarking a simple and easy-to-install PseudoApp in different cloud environments, a user can accurately obtain the performance and resource consumption of the real application. We apply PseudoApp to Apache and TPC-W and find that PseudoApp accurately predicts their performance with 2-8% error in throughput.