Deep Adversarial Imitation Reinforcement Learning for QoS-Aware Cloud Job Scheduling

Although cloud computing is one of the promising technologies for online business services, how to schedule real-time cloud jobs with high quality of service (QoS) is still challenging current techniques. With the advancing of machine learning, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has demonstrated its outstanding capability in dispatching time-sensitive tasks. However, the reinforced rewards in DRL are typically unavailable until the completion of the scheduling for all the jobs. Considering the fact that the trajectory of jobs in cloud is always long, current DRL-based solutions will meet challenges in finding the trajectories with high rewards, and thus would have issues such that the finally trained scheduling policy is suboptimal. To improve the problem, in this article, we propose a more advanced approach called a deep adversarial imitation reinforcement learning (AIRL) framework for scheduling time-sensitive cloud jobs. Specifically, we focus on scheduling user requests in a way to maximize job successful rate along with a significant reduction on job response time. We present the detailed design of our method, and our experimental results demonstrate that AIRL can generally outperform the existing cloud job scheduling approaches, including the DRL-based method, in the presence of different real-time workload and computing resource configurations.