Sinan: Data-Driven, QoS-Aware Cluster Management for Microservices

TL;DR

Sinan is a scalable, data-driven cluster management system for microservices that uses machine learning to optimize resource allocation, ensuring QoS compliance while maximizing resource efficiency in cloud environments.

Contribution

This paper introduces Sinan, a novel, online, QoS-aware cluster manager that leverages scalable ML models to improve resource management for microservices, addressing cascading QoS violations.

Findings

Sinan consistently meets QoS targets in diverse deployments.

It maintains high cluster utilization compared to prior approaches.

The ML models provide explainable insights for better application deployment.

Abstract

Cloud applications are increasingly shifting from large monolithic services, to large numbers of loosely-coupled, specialized microservices. Despite their advantages in terms of facilitating development, deployment, modularity, and isolation, microservices complicate resource management, as dependencies between them introduce backpressure effects and cascading QoS violations. We present Sinan, a data-driven cluster manager for interactive cloud microservices that is online and QoS-aware. Sinan leverages a set of scalable and validated machine learning models to determine the performance impact of dependencies between microservices, and allocate appropriate resources per tier in a way that preserves the end-to-end tail latency target. We evaluate Sinan both on dedicated local clusters and large-scale deployments on Google Compute Engine (GCE) across representative end-to-end applications built with microservices, such as social networks and hotel reservation sites. We show that Sinan always meets QoS, while also maintaining cluster utilization high, in contrast to prior work which leads to unpredictable performance or sacrifices resource efficiency. Furthermore, the techniques in Sinan are explainable, meaning that cloud operators can yield insights from the ML models on how to better deploy and design their applications to reduce unpredictable performance.