HUNTER: An Online Cloud Database Hybrid Tuning System for Personalized Requirements

Recently, using machine learning for performance tuning of cloud database (CDB) service has shown great potentials. However, facing personalized requirements such as various restrictions for tuning with very different workloads, pre-trained models may mismatch or recommend suboptimal configurations given a new workload. On the other hand, if the system tunes configurations in an online fashion, the system will suffer from the cold start problem, resulting in long tuning time and performance fluctuation. To accommodate these problems, we propose an online CDB tuning system called HUNTER. The key feature of HUNTER is a hybrid architecture, which uses samples generated by Genetic Algorithm to warm-start the finer grained exploration of deep reinforcement learning. Meanwhile, we employ Principal Component Analysis, Random Forest, and Fast Exploration Strategy to reduce the search space and the update time of the learning model. In addition, we further propose a clone and parallelization scheme to stress-test workloads on multiple cloned CDB instances (CDBs), resulting in faster and safer configuration exploration. Extensive trials on CDB with public and real-world workloads demonstrate that, given the same time budget and resources, HUNTER improves performance and considerably decreases recommendation time compared to state-of-the-art tuning systems, with accelerations of up to 2.8x and 22.8x utilizing 1 and 20 cloned CDBs, respectively.