PromiseTune: Unveiling Causally Promising and Explainable Configuration Tuning

The high configurability of modern software systems has made configuration tuning a crucial step for assuring system performance, e.g., latency or throughput. However, given the expensive measurements, large configuration space, and rugged configuration landscape, existing tuners suffer ineffectiveness due to the difficult balance of budget utilization between exploring uncertain regions (for escaping from local optima) and exploiting guidance of known good configurations (for fast convergence). The root cause is that we lack knowledge of where the promising regions lay, which also causes challenges in the explainability of the results.