DRL-Scheduling: An Intelligent QoS-Aware Job Scheduling Framework for Applications in Clouds

As an increasing number of traditional applications migrated to the cloud, achieving resource management and performance optimization in such a dynamic and uncertain environment becomes a big challenge for cloud-based application providers. In particular, job scheduling is a non-trivial task, which is responsible for allocating massive job requests submitted by users to the most suitable resources and satisfying user QoS requirements as much as possible. Inspired by recent success of using deep reinforcement learning techniques to solve AI control problems, in this paper, we propose an intelligent QoS-aware job scheduling framework for application providers. A deep reinforcement learning-based job scheduler is the key component of the framework. It is able to learn to make appropriate online job-to-VM decisions for continuous job requests directly from its experiences without any prior knowledge. Experimental results using synthetic workloads and real-world NASA workload traces show that compared with other baseline solutions, our proposed job scheduling approach can efficiently reduce average job response time (e.g., reduced by 40.4% compared with the best baseline for NASA traces), guarantee the QoS at a high level (e.g., job success rate is higher than 93% for all simulated changing workload scenarios), and adapt to different workload conditions.