Burst-Aware Predictive Autoscaling for Containerized Microservices

Autoscaling methods are used for cloud-hosted applications to dynamically scale the allocated resources for guaranteeing Quality-of-Service (QoS). The public-facing application serves dynamic workloads, which contain bursts and pose challenges for autoscaling methods to ensure application performance. Existing State-of-the-art autoscaling methods are burst-oblivious to determine and provision the appropriate resources. For dynamic workloads, it is hard to detect and handle bursts online for maintaining application performance. In this article, we propose a novel burst-aware autoscaling method which detects burst in dynamic workloads using workload forecasting, resource prediction, and scaling decision making while minimizing response time service-level objectives (SLO) violations. We evaluated our approach through a trace-driven simulation, using multiple synthetic and realistic bursty workloads for containerized microservices, improving performance when comparing against existing state-of-the-art autoscaling methods. Such experiments show an increase of <tex-math notation="LaTeX">×</tex-math> 1.09 in total processed requests, a reduction of <tex-math notation="LaTeX">×</tex-math> 5.17 for SLO violations, and an increase of <tex-math notation="LaTeX">×</tex-math> 0.767 cost as compared to the baseline method.