RL-Based Hybrid CPU Scaling for Soft Deadline Constrained Tasks in Container Clouds

Existing CPU scaling approaches have limitations that can lead to inefficient resource allocation and increased penalty costs for tasks with soft deadlines running in container clouds. First, quota allocation based approaches overlook the gap between the obtainable CPU time and allocated quota, causing inefficient CPU utilization and unexpected task behaviors. Second, core allocation based approaches ignore workload dynamics within decision intervals, potentially increasing contention for CPU time among tasks on the same core. Third, existing approaches lack strategies to allocate more resources to critical tasks that incur higher penalty costs when the node’s capacity is insufficient. This article proposes a reinforcement learning based hybrid CPU scaling approach that allocates quota and cores jointly, aiming to minimize penalty costs for timeouts. Based on the embedding generated from a fine-grained CPU demand series, we allocate CPU quotas and determine a dynamic workload-aware core sharing scheme using an attention mechanism that combines respective demands and global criticality regarding penalty costs. Additionally, we integrate the resource gap, CPU time contention, and penalty costs into the reward function to update our model online. The experimental results show the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance.