Cushion: A proactive resource provisioning method to mitigate SLO violations for containerized microservices

Deploying microservices in container-based cloud environments increases the agility of resource scaling. However, the delay in autoscaling for microservices caused by container cold start results in response time service-level objectives (SLO) violations under burst workloads. This paper proposes Cushion, a proactive resource provisioning method for containerized microservices to mitigate SLO violations caused by burst workloads, which promptly schedules workloads to reserved container instances when workloads suddenly increase and meanwhile steadily scales the container instances according to the SLOs of the microservices. Cushion was evaluated through prototype-based experiments in a containerized testbed using a benchmark microservice and four web workload traces by comparing it against existing methods. The experimental results show 9.12x times lower SLO violations, 23.75% higher throughput with 24.35% more CPU usage, and 4.85% more memory usage compared to the baseline methods.