DRe-SCale: A Deep Recurrent Reinforcement Learning Method for Intelligent AutoScaling of Serverless Functions

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) introduces a lightweight, function-based cloud execution model that finds its relevance in a range of applications like IoT-edge data processing and anomaly detection. While cloud service providers (CSPs) offer a near-infinite function elasticity, these applications often experience fluctuating workloads and stricter performance constraints. A typical CSP strategy is to empirically determine and adjust desired function instances or resources, known as autoscaling, based on monitoring-based thresholds such as CPU or memory, to cope with demand and performance. However, threshold configuration either requires expert knowledge, historical data or a complete view of the environment, making autoscaling a performance bottleneck that lacks an adaptable solution. Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are proven to be beneficial in analysing complex cloud environments and result in an adaptable policy that maximizes the expected objectives. Most realistic cloud environments usually involve operational interference and have limited visibility, making them partially observable. A general solution to tackle observability in highly dynamic settings is to integrate Recurrent units with model-free RL algorithms and model a decision process as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the model-free Recurrent RL agents for function autoscaling and compare them against the model-free Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO) algorithm. We explore the integration of a Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) network with the state-of-the-art PPO algorithm to find that under our experimental and evaluation settings, recurrent policies were able to capture the environment parameters and show promising results for function autoscaling. We further compare a PPO-based autoscaling agent with commercially used threshold-based function autoscaling and posit that a LSTM-based autoscaling agent is able to improve throughput by 18%, function execution by 13% and account for 8.4% more function instances.

We set up our experimental multi-node cluster using NeCTAR (Australian National Research Cloud Infrastructure) services on the Melbourne Research Cloud. It includes a combination of 2 nodes with 12/48, 1 node with 16/64, 1 node with 8/32 and 1 node with 4/16 vCPU/GB-RAM configurations. We deploy OpenFaaS along with Prometheus service on MicroK8s (v1.27.2), however, we used Gateway v0.26.3 due to scaling limitations in the latest version and remove its alert manager component to disable rps-based scaling.

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The core component of the proposed autoscaling solution is the integration of recurrent units with a fully-connected multi-layer perceptron (MLP) that takes into environment observation and maintains a hidden internal state to retain relevant information. The LSTM layer is incorporated into both actor and critic networks to retain information i.e., the output of the LSTM layer is fed into fully-connected MLP layers, where the actor (policy network) is responsible for learning an action selection policy and the critic network serves as a guiding measure to improve actor's decision. The network parameters are updated as per PPO clipped surrogate objective function which helps the agent balance its degree of exploration and knowledge exploitation. It further improves network sample efficiency and conserves large policy updates.

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1. LSTM integrated Proximal Policy Optimisation (LSTM-PPO/Recurrent-PPO)
2. vanilla Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO)
3. Deep Recurrent Q-Network (LSTM integrated DQN/DRQN)
4. LSTM integrated Soft-Actor-Critic (LSTM-SAC and SAC)

1. Experimental Results
2. Analysis File

To cite this repository in your works, please use the following entry:

@ARTICLE{10496867,
  author={Agarwal, Siddharth and Rodriguez, Maria A. and Buyya, Rajkumar},
  journal={IEEE Transactions on Services Computing}, 
  title={A Deep Recurrent-Reinforcement Learning Method for Intelligent AutoScaling of Serverless Functions}, 
  year={2024},
  volume={},
  number={},
  pages={1-12},
  doi={10.1109/TSC.2024.3387661}}