A Framework for dynamically meeting performance objectives on a service mesh

Abstract: We present a framework for achieving end-to-end management objectives for multiple services that concurrently execute on a service mesh. We apply reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to train an agent that periodically performs control actions to reallocate resources. We develop and evaluate the framework using a laboratory testbed where we run information and computing services on a service mesh, supported by the Istio and Kubernetes platforms. We investigate different management objectives that include end-to-end delay bounds on service requests, throughput objectives, cost-related objectives, and service differentiation. We compute the control policies on a simulator rather than on the testbed, which speeds up the training time by orders of magnitude for the scenarios we study. Our proposed framework is novel in that it advocates a top-down approach whereby the management objectives are defined first and then mapped onto the available control actions. It allows us to execute several types of control actions simultaneously. By first learning the system model and the operating region from testbed traces, we can train the agent for different management objectives in parallel.