Sinan: Data-Driven, QoS-Aware Cluster Management for Microservices
This addresses resource management challenges for cloud operators deploying microservices, offering an incremental improvement over prior work by combining QoS awareness with efficiency.
The paper tackles the problem of resource management for interactive cloud microservices, which suffer from dependencies causing backpressure and QoS violations, by presenting Sinan, a data-driven cluster manager that uses machine learning to allocate resources and meet end-to-end tail latency targets, achieving high cluster utilization while always meeting QoS in evaluations on local clusters and Google Compute Engine.
Cloud applications are increasingly shifting from large monolithic services, to large numbers of loosely-coupled, specialized microservices. Despite their advantages in terms of facilitating development, deployment, modularity, and isolation, microservices complicate resource management, as dependencies between them introduce backpressure effects and cascading QoS violations. We present Sinan, a data-driven cluster manager for interactive cloud microservices that is online and QoS-aware. Sinan leverages a set of scalable and validated machine learning models to determine the performance impact of dependencies between microservices, and allocate appropriate resources per tier in a way that preserves the end-to-end tail latency target. We evaluate Sinan both on dedicated local clusters and large-scale deployments on Google Compute Engine (GCE) across representative end-to-end applications built with microservices, such as social networks and hotel reservation sites. We show that Sinan always meets QoS, while also maintaining cluster utilization high, in contrast to prior work which leads to unpredictable performance or sacrifices resource efficiency. Furthermore, the techniques in Sinan are explainable, meaning that cloud operators can yield insights from the ML models on how to better deploy and design their applications to reduce unpredictable performance.