Integrating Cognition Cost With Reliability QoS for Dynamic Workflow Scheduling Using Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

The rapid rise of microservice architecture poses severe challenges to workflow scheduling, resource allocation, and goal optimization. However, faults and failures usually happen during workflow running. To ensure the workflow's successful execution during scheduling microservices, this paper proposes a dynamic workflow scheduling algorithm by integrating cognition cost and reliability QoS for using reinforcement learning (WS-CCR). Firstly, we explore the ‘restart policy’ of containers in the Kubernetes architecture, which lays the foundation for our work that adopts the redundancy strategy to ensure workflow operation. Then we consider the cognitive cost based on the fact that users have a cognitive process for different microservices in selecting microservices. Additionally, another optimization goal is the reliability of workflows. On this basis, we design a reasonable reward function in reinforcement learning to generate dynamic strategies. Furthermore, following some generated strategies, our engine will schedule candidate microservices for tasks to execute step by step. A series of experiments on Alibaba and business areas workflows have proven the superior performance of our algorithm. Our WS-CCR can generate better Pareto solution sets than other baselines in terms of improving the reliability of running workflows. Finally, we give a case study to prove the practicability of our method.