Multi-tenancy in public clouds may lead to co-location interference on shared resources, which possibly results in performance degradation of cloud applications. Cloud providers want to know when such events happen and how serious the degradation is, to perform interference-aware migrations and alleviate the problem. However, virtual machines (VM) in Infrastructure-as-a-Service public clouds are black boxes to providers, where application-level performance information cannot be acquired. This makes performance monitoring intensely challenging as cloud providers can only rely on low-level metrics such as CPU usage and hardware counters.We propose a novel machine learning framework, Alioth, to monitor the performance degradation of cloud applications. To feed the data-hungry models, we first elaborate interference generators and conduct comprehensive co-location experiments on a testbed to build Alioth-dataset which reflects the complexity and dynamicity in real-world scenarios. Then we construct Alioth by (1) augmenting features via recovering low-level metrics under no interference using denoising auto-encoders, (2) devising a transfer learning model based on domain adaptation neural network to make models generalize on test cases unseen in offline training, and (3) developing a SHAP explainer to automate feature selection and enhance model interpretability. Experiments show that Alioth achieves an average mean absolute error of 5.29% offline and 10.8% when testing on applications unseen in the training stage, outperforming the baseline methods. Alioth is also robust in signaling quality-of-service violation under dynamicity. Finally, we demonstrate a possible application of Alioth’s interpretability, providing insights to benefit the decision-making of cloud operators. The dataset and code of Alioth have been released on GitHub.

Meta-learning based recommendation systems alleviate the cold-start problem through a bi-level meta-optimization process. Recommendation borrows prior experience from pre-trained static system-level parameters and fine-tunes the model in user-level for new users. However, it is more natural for the system to sample users in a dynamic online sequence in most real-world recommendation systems, which brings further challenges for existing meta-learning based recommendation: system-level updates begins before user-level recommendation models have converged on the whole time series; stable and randomness-resistant bi-level gradient descent approaches are missing in the current meta-learning framework; evaluation on learning abilities across different users are lacked for exploring the diversities of different users.