AWARE: Automate Workload Autoscaling with Reinforcement Learning in Production Cloud Systems

Authors: 

Haoran Qiu and Weichao Mao, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Chen Wang, Hubertus Franke, and Alaa Youssef, IBM Research; Zbigniew T. Kalbarczyk, Tamer Başar, and Ravishankar K. Iyer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Abstract: 

Workload autoscaling is widely used in public and private cloud systems to maintain stable service performance and save resources. However, it remains challenging to set the optimal resource limits and dynamically scale each workload at runtime. Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently been proposed and applied in various systems tasks, including resource management. In this paper, we first characterize the state-of-the-art RL approaches for workload autoscaling in a public cloud and point out that there is still a large gap in taking the RL advances to production systems. We then propose AWARE, an extensible framework for deploying and managing RL-based agents in production systems. AWARE leverages meta-learning and bootstrapping to (a) automatically and quickly adapt to different workloads, and (b) provide safe and robust RL exploration. AWARE provides a common OpenAI Gym-like RL interface to agent developers for easy integration with different systems tasks. We illustrate the use of AWARE in the case of workload autoscaling. Our experiments show that AWARE adapts a learned autoscaling policy to new workloads 5.5x faster than the existing transfer-learning-based approach and provides stable online policy-serving performance with less than 3.6% reward degradation. With bootstrapping, AWARE helps achieve 47.5% and 39.2% higher CPU and memory utilization while reducing SLO violations by a factor of 16.9x during policy training.

USENIX ATC '23 Open Access Sponsored by
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {288784,
author = {Haoran Qiu and Weichao Mao and Chen Wang and Hubertus Franke and Alaa Youssef and Zbigniew T. Kalbarczyk and Tamer Ba{\c s}ar and Ravishankar K. Iyer},
title = {{AWARE}: Automate Workload Autoscaling with Reinforcement Learning in Production Cloud Systems},
booktitle = {2023 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 23)},
year = {2023},
isbn = {978-1-939133-35-9},
address = {Boston, MA},
pages = {387--402},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc23/presentation/qiu-haoran},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jul
}

Presentation Video