Application of Proximal Policy Optimization for Resource Orchestration in Serverless Edge Computing

Serverless computing is a new cloud computing model suitable for providing services in both large cloud and edge clusters. In edge clusters, the autoscaling functions play a key role on serverless platforms as the dynamic scaling of function instances can lead to reduced latency and efficient resource usage, both typical requirements of edge-hosted services. However, a badly configured scaling function can introduce unexpected latency due to so-called “cold start” events or service request losses. In this work, we focus on the optimization of resource-based autoscaling on OpenFaaS, the most-adopted open-source Kubernetes-based serverless platform, leveraging real-world serverless traffic traces. We resort to the reinforcement learning algorithm named Proximal Policy Optimization to dynamically configure the value of the Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, trained on real traffic. This was accomplished via a state space model able to take into account resource consumption, performance values, and time of day. In addition, the reward function definition promotes Service-Level Agreement (SLA) compliance. We evaluate the proposed agent, comparing its performance in terms of average latency, CPU usage, memory usage, and loss percentage with respect to the baseline system. The experimental results show the benefits provided by the proposed agent, obtaining a service time within the SLA while limiting resource consumption and service loss.