CloudFormer: An Attention-based Performance Prediction for Public Clouds with Unknown Workload

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Shahbazinia, Amirhossein, Huang, Darong, Costero, Luis, Atienza, David
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Shahbazinia, Amirhossein
Huang, Darong
Costero, Luis
Atienza, David
author_facet Shahbazinia, Amirhossein
Huang, Darong
Costero, Luis
Atienza, David
contents Cloud platforms are increasingly relied upon to host diverse, resource-intensive workloads due to their scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. In multi-tenant cloud environments, virtual machines are consolidated on shared physical servers to improve resource utilization. While virtualization guarantees resource partitioning for CPU, memory, and storage, it cannot ensure performance isolation. Competition for shared resources such as last-level cache, memory bandwidth, and network interfaces often leads to severe performance degradation. Existing management techniques, including VM scheduling and resource provisioning, require accurate performance prediction to mitigate interference. However, this remains challenging in public clouds due to the black-box nature of VMs and the highly dynamic nature of workloads. To address these limitations, we propose CloudFormer, a dual-branch Transformer-based model designed to predict VM performance degradation in black-box environments. CloudFormer jointly models temporal dynamics and system-level interactions, leveraging 206 system metrics at one-second resolution across both static and dynamic scenarios. This design enables the model to capture transient interference effects and adapt to varying workload conditions without scenario-specific tuning. Complementing the methodology, we provide a fine-grained dataset that significantly expands the temporal resolution and metric diversity compared to existing benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that CloudFormer consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple evaluation metrics, achieving robust generalization across diverse and previously unseen workloads. Notably, CloudFormer attains a mean absolute error (MAE) of just 7.8%, representing a substantial improvement in predictive accuracy and outperforming existing methods at least by 28%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_03394
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CloudFormer: An Attention-based Performance Prediction for Public Clouds with Unknown Workload
Shahbazinia, Amirhossein
Huang, Darong
Costero, Luis
Atienza, David
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Machine Learning
Performance
Cloud platforms are increasingly relied upon to host diverse, resource-intensive workloads due to their scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. In multi-tenant cloud environments, virtual machines are consolidated on shared physical servers to improve resource utilization. While virtualization guarantees resource partitioning for CPU, memory, and storage, it cannot ensure performance isolation. Competition for shared resources such as last-level cache, memory bandwidth, and network interfaces often leads to severe performance degradation. Existing management techniques, including VM scheduling and resource provisioning, require accurate performance prediction to mitigate interference. However, this remains challenging in public clouds due to the black-box nature of VMs and the highly dynamic nature of workloads. To address these limitations, we propose CloudFormer, a dual-branch Transformer-based model designed to predict VM performance degradation in black-box environments. CloudFormer jointly models temporal dynamics and system-level interactions, leveraging 206 system metrics at one-second resolution across both static and dynamic scenarios. This design enables the model to capture transient interference effects and adapt to varying workload conditions without scenario-specific tuning. Complementing the methodology, we provide a fine-grained dataset that significantly expands the temporal resolution and metric diversity compared to existing benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that CloudFormer consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple evaluation metrics, achieving robust generalization across diverse and previously unseen workloads. Notably, CloudFormer attains a mean absolute error (MAE) of just 7.8%, representing a substantial improvement in predictive accuracy and outperforming existing methods at least by 28%.
title CloudFormer: An Attention-based Performance Prediction for Public Clouds with Unknown Workload
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Machine Learning
Performance
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03394