Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

6-2024

Abstract

Microservice architectures have gained prominence in both academia and industry, offering enhanced agility, reusability, and scalability. To simplify scaling operations in microservice architectures, container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes feature Horizontal Pod Auto-scalers (HPAs) designed to adjust the resources of microservices to accommodate fluctuating workloads. However, existing HPAs are not suitable for resourceconstrained environments, as they make scaling decisions based on the individual resource capacities of microservices, leading to service unavailability and performance degradation. Furthermore, HPA architectures exhibit several issues, including inefficient data processing and a lack of coordinated scaling operations. To address these concerns, we propose Smart HPA, a flexible resource-efficient horizontal pod auto-scaler. It features a hierarchical architecture that integrates both centralized and decentralized architectural styles to leverage their respective strengths while addressing their limitations. We introduce resource-efficient heuristics that empower Smart HPA to exchange resources among microservices, facilitating effective auto-scaling of microservices in resourceconstrained environments. Our experimental results show that Smart HPA outperforms the Kubernetes baseline HPA by reducing resource overutilization, overprovisioning, and underprovisioning while increasing resource allocation to microservice applications.

Keywords

Microservices, Auto-scaling, Self-Adaptation, Software Architecture, Resource Management, Kubernetes

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Software Architecture, Charminar, Hyderabad, India, 2024 June 4-8

First Page

1

Last Page

12

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Piscataway, NJ

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