Adaptive Resource Efficient Microservice Deployment in Cloud-Edge Continuum

User-facing services are now evolving towards the microservice architecture where a service is built by connecting multiple microservice stages. Since the entire service is heavy, the microservice architecture shows the opportunity to only offload some microservice stages to the edge devices that are close to the end users. However, emerging techniques often result in the violation of Quality-of-Service (QoS) of microservice-based services in cloud-edge continuum, as they do not consider the communication overhead or the resource contention between microservices and external co-located tasks. We propose Nautilus, a runtime system that effectively deploys microservice-based user-facing services in cloud-edge continuum. Nautilus ensures the QoS of microservice-based user-facing services while minimizing the required computational resources, which is comprised of a communication-aware microservice mapper, a contention-aware resource manager and an IO-sensitive and load-aware microservice migration scheduler. The mapper divides the microservice graph into multiple partitions based on the communication overhead and maps the partitions to appropriate nodes. On each node, the resource manager determines the optimal resource allocation for its microservices based on reinforcement learning that may capture the complex contention behaviors. Once the microservices are suffered from external IO pressure, the IO-sensitive microservice scheduler migrates the critical one to idle nodes. Furthermore, when the load of microservices changes dynamically, the load-aware microservice scheduler migrates microservices from busy nodes to idle ones to ensure the QoS goal of the entire service. Our experimental results show that Nautilus can guarantee the required QoS target under external shared resources contention while the state-of-the-art suffers from QoS violations. Meanwhile, Nautilus reduces the computational resource usage by 23.9% and the network bandwidth usage by 53.4%, while achieving the required 99%-ile latency.