Cloud service providers adopt a credit system to
allow users to obtain periods of performance bursts without
additional cost. For example, the Amazon EC2 T2 instance
offers low baseline performance and the capability to achie
ve
short periods of high performance using CPU credits. Once a
T2 instance is created and assigned some initial credits, wh
ile
its CPU utilization is above the baseline threshold, there i
s a
transient period where performance is boosted and the assig
ned
CPU credits are used. After all credits are used, the maximum
achievable performance drops to baseline. Credits accrue p
e-
riodically, when the instance utilization is below the base
line
threshold. This paper proposes a methodology to increase th
e
performance benefits of T2 by seamlessly extending the dura
tion
of the transient period while maintaining high performance
. This
extension of the high performance transient period is combi
ned
with proactive migration to further take advantage of the in
itially
assigned credits. We conduct experiments to demonstrate th
e
benefits of this methodology for both single-tier and multi
-tier
applications.