POBO: Safe and optimal resource management for cloud microservices

Resource management in microservices is challenging due to the uncertain latency–resource relationship, dynamic environment, and strict Service-Level Agreement (SLA) guarantees. This paper presents a Pessimistic and Optimistic Bayesian Optimization framework, named POBO, for safe and optimal resource configuration for microservice applications. POBO leverages Bayesian learning to estimate the uncertain latency–resource functions and combines primal–dual and penalty-based optimization to maximize resource efficiency while guaranteeing strict SLAs. We prove that POBO can achieve sublinear regret and SLA violation against the optimal resource configuration in hindsight. We have implemented a prototype of POBO and conducted extensive experiments on a real-world microservice application. Our results show that POBO can find the safe and optimal configuration efficiently, outperforming Kubernetes’ built-in auto-scaling module and the state-of-the-art algorithms.