Hybrid Orchestration of AI Services and Microservices in Cloud-Edge Collaboration
Kai Peng, Xudong Liu, Di Han, Yi Hu, Menglan Hu, Chao Cai, Zehui Xiong · IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing · 2026
The rapid development of AI accelerates the implementation and delivery of AI applications in diverse fields. In cloud-edge collaboration, delivering a complete AI application relies on the robust coordination between AI-supporting microservices and AI services. However, most existing studies only coarsely considered monolithic AI service orchestration while neglecting microservice orchestration. Such coarse-grained orchestration severely impacts application performance. To enable diverse high-performance AI applications, fine-grained hybrid orchestration of AI services and microservices (HOAIM) is highly desirable, yet presents formidable challenges. Due to heterogeneous services, call dependencies, and service multiplexing, fine-grained hybrid orchestration modeling is highly non-trivial. Moreover, the tight coupling between deployment and routing results in a complex joint optimization problem. To address this, we first propose a heterogeneous service orchestration network that supports orchestration optimization and automated management. Then, based on queuing networks and multi-instance models, we conduct an accurate analysis of delay and load. Furthermore, to achieve efficient hybrid orchestration, we propose preference-driven resource allocation and instance computation algorithms, along with reinforcement learning with action masking and reward shaping. Finally, extensive trace-driven simulations demonstrate that our algorithms optimize average response delay by up to 41.83%, and achieve significant advantages in load balancing, response success rate, and resource efficiency.