AlphaR: Learning-Powered Resource Management for Irregular, Dynamic Microservice Graph

Xiaofeng Hou, Chao Li, Jiacheng Liu, Lu Zhang, Shaolei Ren, Jingwen Leng, Quan Chen, Minyi Guo

Abstract: The microservice architecture is a hot trend which proposes to transform the traditional monolith application into massive dynamic and irregular small services. To boost the overall throughput and ensure the guaranteed latency, it is desirable to process massive service requests in parallel with efficient resource sharing in data centers. However, the disaggregation nature of microservice unavoidably upscales the design space of resource management and increases its complexity. In this paper, we propose AlphaR, a learning-powered resource management system tailored to the microservice environment. The basic idea of AlphaR is to generate microservice-specific resource management policies for improving efficiency. Specifically, we take the first step to use bipartite graph as a convenient abstraction for application built with microservices. Based on this, we devise a bipartite feature inference approach named Bi-GNN to extract the temporal characteristics of microservices. Furthermore, we implement a policy network to select appropriate resource allocation choices for maximizing the performance in resource-constrained data centers. AlphaR can improve the mean and p95 response time by up to 80% and 77.5% respectively compared with conventional schemes.