Dependable Workflow Scheduling for Microservice QoS Based on Deep Q-Network

Workflow scheduling for microservice has become an important and challenging research topic. To design a high-performance and reliable scheduling model, we propose a dependable workflow scheduling algorithm for microservice quality of service (QoS) based on deep-Q-Network, namely the DWSM. Firstly, we utilize the redundancy strategy based on the restart strategy of the Kubernetes container to optimize the dependability of workflow. Then this paper quantifies the dependability indicator and designs the reward function based on three QoS attributes including execution time, resources consumption and dependability to generate the scheduling strategy through DQN. Finally, we utilize a real-world data set to evaluate our algorithm and compare it with several state-of-art baselines including heterogeneous earliest-finish-time (HEFT), greedy algorithm and nondominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-III). Experimental results show that our DWSM algorithm achieves higher performance in dependability and saves more CPU resources. In addition to simulation, we have implemented it on a workflow engine and deployed real workflow cases to test its effectiveness in practice.