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AppFormix Collaborates with Intel to Deliver Solution to "Noisy Neighbor" Problem for Cloud OperatorsAppFormix has integrated Intel (News - Alert)® Resource Director Technology (Intel® RDT) into its performance monitoring platform, delivering performance improvements that address the "noisy neighbor" problem common to multi-tenant cloud environments. Intel® RDT technology is available in the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v4 product family, which was unveiled March 31 at an event in San Francisco. The integration means that cloud operators running servers powered by the new Intel® Xeon® processor E5 v4 family can use AppFormix software to monitor application performance at the processor level, giving them an unprecedented degree of visibility into and control over application performance in real time. "Anyone who runs clouds for a living knows that the tools we've used for a generation to optimize infrastructure performance are insufficient for modern clouds," said Sumeet Singh, CEO of AppFormix. "We've built a platform for the DevOps era that developers and operators can share. Our software coupled with Intel® RDT gives unprecedented visibility into, and control over, workload management at the processor level." *** Visit the AppFormix / Intel Demonstration Page for In-Depth Resources and Downloads *** The launch of Intel® RDT and the integration of the technology into AppFormix software answers a challenge facing cloud management professionals shifting to cloud-native applications in the DevOps era. Applications are being rewritten and new ones developed for dynamic, scalable cloud environments. Motivating this shift is an implicit expectation that cloud and container infrastructure environments will deliver enhanced agility and improved ROI. This shift demands transparency and real-time monitoring and analytics. As enterprises embrace micro-service architectures where thousands of containers can run simultaneously on shared hardware, unprecedented demands are placed on infrastructure. The combination of AppFormix software with Intel® RDT capabilities is designed to yield substantial benefits in software-defined infrastructure. These allow for the prioritization of important containers, VMs or applications, as well as the detection and mitigation of noisy neighbors. It also improves the workflow between infrastructure maintainers and software developers in a modern, collaborative DevOps environment. AppFormix user Josh Barry of ViaSat (News - Alert) previewed the solution and commented, "Our applications demand reliable performance. The combination of technologies in the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v4 product family and AppFormix software has the potential for our operators and developers to better understand and manage cloud environments, delivering the user experience that our customers demand." *** Watch the Solution Overview Video *** A Noisy-Neighbor Performance Benchmark The following benchmark was performed for a micro-services environment, using Docker containers. The results of the benchmarking show significant gains in throughput and latency of containerized services when utilizing Intel Cache Allocation Technology (CAT), one of the capabilities within Intel RDT:
More detail on the benchmark results can be found at www.appformix.com/intel. Richard Uhlig, Intel Fellow and director of Systems and Software Research in Intel Labs remarked, "Multi-tenant production environments pose a difficult challenge for cloud operators. Ensuring consistent performance is not an easy task in an environment where many resources are shared. Additional monitoring insight and control over how shared processor resources such as the L3 cache are used is important, and Intel® RDT coupled with AppFormix software provides an important example of how to combine real-time visualization, monitoring and control features into an orchestration toolkit to enhance operator visibility, telemetry and prioritization capabilities." Benchmark Notes 1Baseline configuration: NGINX web server connected to external load generation system (below) based on 2x Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2699 v4, 2.2GHz, 22 cores, 64GB DDR4-2133, 10Gb link via X540-AT2 NICs. Ubuntu14.04, Kernel v4.4 + RDT Patches. C1E disabled and turbo disabled for test repeatability. Source (News - Alert) is AppFormix as of March 3rd, 2016. New configuration: Intel's Cache Allocation Technology (CAT) enabled to restrict the "noisy neighbor" applications to 10% of the L3 cache (effective CAT mask 0x00003) "Noisy neighbor" applications: 11 processes per socket of stream set to array size 100e6 External Load generation system: wg/WRK running 22 threads on Ubuntu (News - Alert) 14.04, dbase on 2x Intel Xeon L5520@ 2.27GHz CPUs, 24GB DDR3-1067 with 10Gb networking (Intel X540-AT2 NICs) About AppFormix AppFormix is a startup delivering a cloud service optimization platform targeting enterprise DevOps teams. Via real-time analytics, capacity planning, and orchestration tooling, AppFormix software gives cloud operators and applications developers a shared dashboard to understand performance across the entire cloud stack, for hybrid, private, and public enterprise clouds. AppFormix works with popular cloud environments like AWS, OpenStack, Azure, GCE and Kubernetes. The company is backed by August Capital and is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. More at www.appformix.com. Intel and Xeon are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the United States and other countries.
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