Towards Evaluating Stream Processing Autoscalers

Abstract

In this work, we evaluate autoscaling solutions for stream processing engines. Although autoscaling has become a mainstream subject of research in the last decade, the database research community has yet to evaluate different autoscaling techniques under a proper benchmarking setting and evaluation framework. As a result, every newly proposed autoscaling solution only performs a shallow performance evaluation and comparison against existing solutions. In this paper, we evaluate autoscaling solutions by employing two streaming queries and a dynamic workload that follows a cosinus pattern. Our experiments reveal that current autoscaling techniques fail to account for generated lag due to rescaling or underprovisioning and cannot efficiently handle practical scenarios of intensely dynamic workloads.