To Tune or Not to Tune? In Search of Optimal Configurations for Data Analytics

This experimental study presents a number of issues that pose a challenge for practical configuration tuning and its deployment in data analytics frameworks. These issues include: 1) the assumption of a static workload or environment, ignoring the dynamic characteristics of the analytics environment ( e.g., increase in input data size, changes in allocation of resources). 2) the amortization of tuning costs and how this influences what workloads can be tuned in practice in a cost-effective manner. 3) the need for a comprehensive incremental tuning solution for a diverse set of workloads. We adapt different ML techniques in order to obtain efficient incremental tuning in our problem domain, and propose Tuneful, a configuration tuning framework. We show how it is designed to overcome the above issues and illustrate its applicability by running a wide array of experiments in cloud environments provided by two different service providers.