Graph-Reinforcement-Learning-Based Dependency-Aware Microservice Deployment in Edge Computing

Microservice architecture is a design philosophy that achieves decoupling by decomposing a monolithic application into multiple lightweight microservices. Meanwhile, edge computing can significantly reduce service latency and network congestion by extending computation and storage resources to the network edge. Therefore, in the microservice-oriented edge computing platform, a fundamental problem is how to efficiently deploy microservices with complex dependencies on the resource-constrained edge servers to satisfy the Quality of Service (QoS) constraints of users. Most of the existing studies ignore multiple call graphs with differentiated dependencies for an application, which often result in the violation of QoS. To address this issue, in this article, we first model the request response time of multiple instances and multiple call graphs scenario with service conflicts. Then, different from the existing heuristic or approximation algorithms which rely heavily on expert knowledge, we propose a graph-reinforcement-learning-based deployment (GRLD) framework. GRLD uses a graph convolutional network (GCN) to extract the graph data required for multiple call graphs with messages passing and aggregation, and the generated feature is fed into the underlying network of deep-reinforcement-learning (DRL). Experimental results show that GRLD outperforms counterparts in reducing service deployment overhead while satisfying QoS constraints of multiple call graphs.