Efficient and Reuseable Cloud Configuration Search Using Discovery Spaces

Abstract: Finding the optimal set of cloud resources to deploy a given workload at minimal cost while meeting a defined service level agreement is an active area of research. Combining tens of parameters applicable across a large selection of compute, storage, and services offered by cloud providers with similar numbers of application-specific parameters leads to configuration spaces with millions of deployment options. In this paper, we propose Discovery Space, an abstraction that formalizes the description of workload configuration problems, and exhibits a set of characteristics required for structured, robust and distributed investigations of large search spaces. We describe a concrete implementation of the Discovery Space abstraction and show that it is generalizable across a diverse set of workloads such as LLM inference and Big Data Analytics. We demonstrate that our approach enables safe, transparent sharing of data between executions of best-of-breed optimizers increasing the efficiency of optimal configuration detection in large search spaces. We also demonstrate how Discovery Spaces enable transfer and reuse of knowledge across similar search spaces, enabling configuration search speed-ups of over 90%.