Container Scaling Strategy Based on Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Elasticity capability is one of the most important capabilities of cloud computing, which combines large-scale resource allocation capability to quickly achieve minute-level resource demand provisioning to meet the elasticity requirements of different scale scenarios. The elasticity capability is mainly determined by the container start-up speed and container scaling strategy together, where the container scaling strategy contains both vertical container scaling strategy and horizontal container scaling strategy. In order to make the container scaling policy more effective and improve the application service quality and resource utilization, we briefly introduce Kubernetes’ horizontal pod autoscaling (HPA) strategy, analyze the existing problem of HPA, and develop a container scaling strategy based on reinforcement learning. First, we analyze the problems of Kubernetes’ existing HPA container autoscaling strategy in the scale-up and scale-down phases, respectively. Second, the Markov decision model is used to model the container scaling problem. Then, we propose a model-based reinforcement learning algorithm to solve the container scaling problem. Finally, we compare the experimental results of the HPA scaling strategy and the model-based reinforcement learning strategy with the results from the resource utilization of the application, the change of the number of pods, and the application response time; through the experimental analysis, we verify that the reinforcement learning-based container scaling strategy can guarantee the application service quality and improve the utilization of the application resources more effectively than the HPA strategy.