Demonstrating a System for Dynamically Meeting Management Objectives on a Service Mesh

We demonstrate a management system that lets a service provider achieve end-to-end management objectives under varying load for applications on a service mesh based on the Istio and Kubernetes platforms. The management objectives for the demonstration include end-to-end delay bounds on service requests, throughput objectives, and service differentiation. Our method for finding effective control policies includes a simulator and a control module. The simulator is instantiated with traces from a testbed, and the control module trains a reinforcement learning (RL) agent to efficiently learn effective control policies on the simulator. The learned policies are then transfered to the testbed to perform dynamic control actions based on monitored system metrics. We show that the learned policies dynamically meet management objectives on the testbed and can be changed on the fly.
Part of ISBN 9781665477161QC 20230821