Network packet

Materials science

Stateful firewall

Operating system

Executor

Telecommunications

Computer science

Distributed computing

Computer network

Latency (audio)

Elasticity (physics)

Political science

Synchronization (alternating current)

Workload

Composite material

Channel (broadcasting)

Elasticity is highly desirable for stream systems to guarantee low latency against workload dynamics, such as surges in arrival rate and fluctuations in data distribution. Existing systems achieve elasticity using a resource-centric approach that repartitions keys across the parallel instances, i.e., executors, to balance the workload and scale operators. However, such operator-level repartitioning requires global synchronization and prohibits rapid elasticity. We propose an executor-centric approach that avoids operator-level key repartitioning and implements executors as the building blocks of elasticity. By this new approach, we design the Elasticutor framework with two level of optimizations: i) a novel implementation of executors, i.e., elastic executors, that perform elastic multi-core execution via efficient intra-executor load balancing and executor scaling and ii) a global model-based scheduler that dynamically allocates CPU cores to executors based on the instantaneous workloads. We implemented a prototype of Elasticutor and conducted extensive experiments. We show that Elasticutor doubles the throughput and achieves up to two orders of magnitude lower latency than previous methods for dynamic workloads of real-world applications.

Elasticutor