Web scaling frameworks: A novel class of frameworks for scalable web services in cloud environments

The social web and huge growth of mobile smart devices dramatically increases the performance requirements for web services. State-of-the-art Web Application Frameworks (WAFs) do not offer complete scaling concepts with automatic resource-provisioning, elastic caching or guaranteed maximum response times. These functionalities, however, are supported by cloud computing and needed to scale an application to its demands. Components like proxies, load-balancers, distributed caches, queuing and messaging systems have been around for a long time and in each field relevant research exists. Nevertheless, to create a scalable web service it is seldom enough to deploy only one component. In this work we propose to combine those complementary components to a predictable, composed system. The proposed solution introduces a novel class of web frameworks called Web Scaling Frameworks (WSFs) that take over the scaling. The proposed mathematical model allows a universally applicable prediction of performance in the single-machine- and multi-machine scope. A prototypical implementation is created to empirically validate the mathematical model and demonstrates both the feasibility and increase of performance of a WSF. The results show that the application of a WSF can triple the requests handling capability of a single machine and additionally reduce the number of total machines by 44%.