Fuzzy Reinforcement Learning based Microservice Allocation in Cloud Computing Environments

Abstract

Nowadays the Cloud Computing paradigm has become the defacto platform for deploying and managing user applications. Monolithic Cloud applications pose several challenges in terms of scalability and flexibility. Hence, Cloud applications are designed as microservices. Application scheduling and energy efficiency are key concerns in Cloud computing research. Allocating the microservice containers to the hosts in the datacenter is an NP-hard problem. There is a need for efficient allocation strategies to determine the placement of the microservice containers in Cloud datacenters to minimize Service Level Agreement violations and energy consumption. In this paper, we design a Reinforcement Learning-based Microservice Allocation (RL-MA) approach. The approach is implemented in the ContainerCloudSim simulator. The evaluation is conducted using the real-world Google cluster trace. Results indicate that the proposed method reduces both the SLA violation and energy consumption when compared to the existing policies. © 2019 IEEE.