Fast and Efficient Scaling for Microservices with SurgeGuard

The microservice architecture is increasingly popular for flexible, large-scale online applications. However, existing resource management mechanisms incur high latency in detecting Quality of Service (QoS) violations, and hence, fail to allocate resources effectively under commonly-observed varying load conditions. This results in over-allocation coupled with a late response that increase both the total cost of ownership and the magnitude of each QoS violation event. We present SurgeGuard, a decentralized resource controller for microservice applications specifically designed to guard application QoS during surges in load and network latency. SurgeGuard uses the key insight that for rapid detection and effective management of QoS violations, the controller must be aware of any available slack in latency and communication patterns between microservices within a task-graph. Our experiments show that for the workloads in DeathStarBench, SurgeGuard on average reduces the combined violation magnitude and duration by $61.1 \%$ and $93.7 \%$, respectively, compared to the well-known Parties and Caladan algorithms, and requires $8 \%$ fewer resources than Parties.