Towards Autoscaling with Guarantees on Kubernetes Clusters
Stephen Burroughs, Helge Dickel, Martin van Zijl, Vladimir Podolskiy, Michael Gerndt, Robi Malik, Panos Patros · 2021
Autoscaling is used by cloud providers, microser-vices, and edge computing applications to respond to dynamic load fluctuations. A critical direction of research has focused on providing guarantees under uncertainty that the auto scaling system will work as intended-both at design-time and more importantly, at runtime. In this work, we evaluate the efficacy of three complementary methods: A) deterministic finite automata, B) probabilistic process algebra and C) Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) control. We experimentally evaluate their efficacy in modelling and verify autoscaling on clusters managed by Kubernetes. Our results suggest that deterministic modelling can provide theoretically optimal guarantees for small deployments; probabilistic algebras are able to capture stochastic behaviours, but benefit from deterministic templates; and control theory benefits by providing a black-box approach for modelling, verification and control.