Rain: A Workload Generation Toolkit for Cloud Computing Applications

Existing workload generation tools are not flexible enough to generate workloads that vary in three key dimensions relevant for making resource allocation decisions for Cloud Computing applications - variations in the amount of load, variations in the mix of operations performed by clients (e.g. changes in reads vs. writes or customer usage-patterns) and variations in the popularity of the data accessed, i.e., data hotspots. This paper presents Rain, a workload generation toolkit designed to address this lack of flexibility.