CloudScout: A Non-Intrusive Approach to Service Dependency Discovery

Nowadays, numerous enterprises are migrating their applications into cloud computing environments. Typically, the applications are composed of several dependent service components that span many hosts and network devices. In light of this, exploring the dependency between service components can be beneficial for achieving fast network application response time. Moreover, it is significant to consolidate service components according to resource constraints, service dependency, and network structure. However, it is a tedious task to discover the dependency among service components without expert knowledge of the running application. In this paper, we propose CloudScout, a non-intrusive approach that is capable of automatically discovering dependent service components. CloudScout analyzes the correlation among service components based on the time-series information from system monitoring logs. We address two key challenges in CloudScout: service distance calculation and dependent service clustering. We conduct experiments on five applications with 290 service components that span 20 physical hosts across two data centers. The experimental results demonstrate that CloudScout can successfully discover the dependency among service components and facilitate reducing the network latency of network applications and distributed applications.