SLA violations do happen in real world. An SLA violation represents the failure of guaranteeing a service, which leads to unwanted consequences such as penalty payments, profit margin reduction, reputation degradation, customer churn and service interruptions. Hence, in the context of cloud-hosted big data analytics applications (BDAAs), it is paramount for providers to predict and prevent SLA violations. While machine learning-based techniques have been applied to detect SLA violations for web service or general cloud service, the study on detecting SLA violations dedicated for cloud-hosted BDAAs is still lacking. In this article, we propose four machine learning techniques and integrate 12 resampling methods to detect SLA violations for batch-based BDAAs in the cloud. We evaluate the efficiency of the proposed techniques in comparison with ideal and baseline classifiers based on a real-world trace dataset (Alibaba). Our work not only helps providers to choose the best performing prediction technique, but also provides them capabilities to uncover the hidden pattern of multiple configurations of BDAAs across layers.

As we come to terms with various big data challenges, one vital issue remains largely untouched. That is service level agreement (SLA) management to deliver strong Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for big data analytics applications (BDAA) sharing the same underlying infrastructure, for example, a public cloud platform. Although SLA and QoS are not new concepts as they originated much before the cloud computing and big data era, its importance is amplified and complexity is aggravated by the emergence of time-sensitive BDAAs such as social network-based stock recommendation and environmental monitoring. These applications require strong QoS guarantees and dependability from the underlying cloud computing platform to accommodate real-time responses while handling ever-increasing complexities and uncertainties. Hence, the over-reaching goal of this PhD research is to develop novel simulation, modelling and benchmarking tools and techniques that can aid researchers and practitioners in studying the impact of uncertainties (contention, failures, anomalies, etc.) on the final SLA and QoS of a cloud-hosted BDAA.