GIRP: Energy-Efficient QoS-Oriented Microservice Resource Provisioning via Multi-Objective Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning
Honggang Yuan, Ting Wang, Min Cang Fu, Yuanming Shi · IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing · 2025
Microservice architecture has revolutionized web service development by facilitating loosely coupled and independently developable components distributed as containers or virtual machines. While existing studies emphasize end-to-end latency, this paper investigates energy-efficient quality-of-service (QoS)-oriented microservice provisioning, focusing on both QoS satisfaction and power consumption (PC) conservation. We propose the Green and Intelligent Resource Provision (GIRP) architecture, integrating a data-driven energy-latency-aware resource allocation and scheduling manager to balance latency and PC. To reconcile the trade-offs involved, a dual-objective optimization problem is formulated to minimize latency and energy use by selecting proper servers, allocating CPU cores, and determining service replicas. To address challenges with discrete variables, dual objectives, and implicit mappings, we leverage a model-free deep deterministic policy gradient-based reinforcement learning algorithm. Specifically, we develop a multi-task agent via the Multi-gate Mixture-of-Experts model to simultaneously make two separate actions regarding CPU core numbers and service replica numbers, followed by a single-task agent to determine service scheduling. Extensive experiments on the DeathStarBenchmark testbed validate GIRP’s effectiveness, demonstrating approximately 52% resource savings and a 43% reduction in PC compared to leading methods like Sinan, Firm, and heuristic-based algorithms. These results highlight GIRP’s capability to optimize microservice orchestration by balancing end-to-end latency and power efficiency.