COVID-19 pandemic created unexpected demand for our physical infrastructure. We increased our computing supply by growing our infrastructure footprint as well as expanded existing capacity by using various techniques among those DVFS boosting. This paper describes our experience in deploying DVFS boosting to expand capacity.

Meta maintains additional capacity within its infrastructure to ensure high availability for business workloads, accommodating user growth, temporal traffic variations, and unforeseen regional failures. However, this strategic choice inherently leads to underutilization of resources. We employ oversubscription as an effective strategy to mitigate infrastructure underutilization.

Resource isolation is a fundamental requirement in datacenter environments. However, our production experience in Meta’s large-scale datacenters shows that existing IO control mechanisms for block storage are inadequate in containerized environments. IO control needs to provide proportional resources to containers while taking into account the hardware heterogeneity of storage devices and the idiosyncrasies of the workloads deployed in datacenters. The speed of modern SSDs requires IO control to execute with low-overheads. Furthermore, IO control should strive for work conservation, take into account the interactions with the memory management subsystem, and avoid priority inversions that lead to isolation failures. To address these challenges, this paper presents IOCost, an IO control solution that is designed for containerized environments and provides scalable, work-conserving, and low-overhead IO control for heterogeneous storage devices and diverse workloads in datacenters. IOCost performs offline profiling to build a device model and uses it to estimate device occupancy of each IO request. To minimize runtime overhead, it separates IO control into a fast per-IO issue path and a slower periodic planning path. A novel work-conserving budget donation algorithm enables containers to dynamically share unused budget. We have deployed IOCost across the entirety of Meta’s datacenters comprised of millions of ma- chines, upstreamed IOCost to the Linux kernel, and open-sourced our device-profiling tools. IOCost has been running in production for two years, providing IO control for Meta’s fleet. We describe the design of IOCost and share our experience deploying it at scale.

Most of today's servers, with numerous CPU cores and other plentiful direct resources, host co-located workloads using mechanisms to reduce hardware resource contention. However, power is an equally important indirect resource in a server that is shared between the co-located applications, for which they can contend, especially when power budgets are tight. We refer to this as a "power struggle". While there is a considerable amount of prior effort on server power capping, they are largely oblivious to power as an indirectly shared resource. This indirect resource exhibits a unique set of properties - spatial non-multiplexing, non-convex, fluidic, time-shifting and dynamic capacity - which have not been explicitly tackled so far. We propose policies that explicitly consider these properties to mediate power struggles, implement these on real hardware, and provide experimental results to show the performance benefits of our solution.

Small and medium sized enterprises use the cloud for running online, user-facing, tail latency sensitive applications with well-defined fixed monthly budgets. For these applications, adequate system capacity must be provisioned to extract maximal performance despite the challenges of uncertainties in load and request-sizes. In this paper, we address the problem of capacity provisioning under fixed budget constraints with the goal of minimizing tail latency.

Storage-intensive systems in data centers rely heavily on DRAM and SSDs for the performance of reads and persistent writes, respectively. These applications pose a diverse set of requirements, and are limited by fixed capacity, fixed access latency, and fixed function of these resources as either memory or storage. In contrast, emerging memory technologies like 3D-Xpoint, battery-backed DRAM, and ASIC-based fast memory-compression offer capabilities across several dimensions. However, existing proposals to use such technologies can only improve either read or write performance but not both without requiring extensive changes to the application, and the operating system. We present PolyEMT, a system that employs an emerging memory technology based cache to the SSD, and transparently morphs the capabilities of this cache across several dimensions - persistence, capacity, latency - to jointly improve both read and write performance. We demonstrate the benefits of PolyEMT using several large-scale storage-intensive workloads from our datacenters.

We show cloud developers how to right size data center (DC) capacity for geo-distributed applications deployed on several multi-megawatt DCs, possibly also using many smaller edge DCs. Note that capacity considerations for a geo-distributed infrastructure do not decompose into individual DC capacity planning. When edge DCs are used, heterogeneous availability and costs affect the capacity split between the edge and core DCs. Non-uniform spatial distribution of clients and interdependence between latency and availability constraints make it non-trivial to provision the right capacity at each DC. We develop a geo-distributed capacity planning framework to capture the key factors that influence capacity, ranging from application demand patterns, latency and availability requirements, DC cost-availability trade-offs, and data replication overheads. We apply our framework to a realistic application and DC infrastructure setting to gather insights into how capacity should be provisioned and allocated across DCs for a representative set of requirements and costs.

Cloud datacenters must ensure high availability for the hosted applications and failures can be the bane of datacenter operators. Understanding the what, when and why of failures can help tremendously to mitigate their occurrence and impact. Failures can, however, depend on numerous spatial and temporal factors spanning hardware, workloads, support facilities, and even the environment. One has to rely on failure data from the field to quantify the influence of these factors on failures. Towards this goal, we collect failures data along with many parameters that might influence failures from two large production datacenters with very diverse characteristics. We show that multiple factors simultaneously affect failures, and these factors may interact in non-trivial ways. This makes conventional approaches that study aggregate characteristics or single parameter influences, rather inaccurate. Instead, we build a multi-factor analysis framework to systematically identify influencing factors, quantify their relative impact, and help in more accurate decision making for failure mitigation. We demonstrate this approach for three important decisions: spare capacity provisioning, comparing the reliability of hardware for vendor selection, and quantifying flexibility in datacenter climate control for cost-reliability trade-offs.

Despite the growing popularity of Solid State Disks (SSDs) in the datacenter, little is known about their reliability characteristics in the field. The little knowledge is mainly vendor supplied, which cannot really help understand how SSD failures can manifest and impact production systems, in order to take appropriate actions. Besides failure data, a detailed characterization requires wide spectrum of data about factors influencing SSD failures, right from provisioning (what models' where and when deployed' etc.) to the operational ones (workloads, read-write intensities, write amplification, etc.). We analyze over half a million SSDs that span multiple generations spread across several datacenters which host a wide range of workloads over nearly 3 years. By studying the diverse set of factors on SSD failures, and their symptoms, our work provides the first look at the what, when and why characteristics of SSD failures in production datacenters.

Despite the growing popularity of Solid State Disks (SSDs) in the datacenter, little is known about their reliability characteristics in the field. The little knowledge is mainly vendor supplied, and such information cannot really help understand how SSD failures can manifest and impact the operation of production systems, in order to take appropriate remedial measures. Besides actual failure data and the symptoms exhibited by SSDs before failing, a detailed characterization effort requires wide set of data about factors influencing SSD failures, right from provisioning factors to the operational ones. This paper presents an extensive SSD failure characterization by analyzing a wide spectrum of data from over half a million SSDs that span multiple generations spread across several datacenters which host a wide spectrum of workloads over nearly 3 years. By studying the diverse set of design, provisioning and operational factors on failures, and their symptoms, our work provides the first comprehensive analysis of the what, when and why characteristics of SSD failures in production datacenters.