Service State Management

How can stateful cloud services be optimized to minimize runtime IT resource consumption?

Problem

A cloud service designed to place significant data into memory for prolonged periods can consume excessive amounts of runtime processing, thereby unreasonably taxing the overall cloud infrastructure and imposing additional usage costs on cloud consumers.

Solution

The cloud service is designed to integrate with a state management system allowing it to defer state data at runtime when necessary so as to minimize its IT resource consumption.

Application

A state management system requires a cloud storage device capable of temporarily holding and releasing state data exchanged by the cloud service. The cloud service itself needs to be equipped with logic to determine when and how to release and retrieve state data.

Mechanisms

Cloud Storage Device, Cloud Usage Monitor, Hypervisor, Pay-Per-Use Monitor, Resource Replication, State Management Database, Virtual Server

Compound Patterns

Burst In, Burst Out to Private Cloud, Burst Out to Public Cloud, Cloud Authentication, Cloud Balancing, Elastic Environment, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Isolated Trust Boundary, Multitenant Environment, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Resilient Environment, Resource Workload Management, Secure Burst Out to Private Cloud/Public Cloud, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

A sample scenario in which cloud service state data is manually deferred and restored.

NIST Reference Architecture Mapping

This pattern relates to the highlighted parts of the NIST reference architecture, as follows: