A Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Preemptive Approach for Cost-Aware Cloud Job Scheduling

With some specific characteristics such as elastics and scalability, cloud computing has become the most promising technology for online business nowadays. However, how to efficiently perform real-time job scheduling in cloud still poses significant challenges. The reason is that those jobs are highly dynamic and complex, and it is always hard to allocate them to computing resources in an optimal way, such as to meet the requirements from both service providers and users. In recent years, various works demonstrate that deep reinforcement learning (DRL) can handle real-time cloud jobs well in scheduling. However, to our knowledge, none of them has ever considered extra optimization opportunities for the allocated jobs in their scheduling frameworks. Given this fact, in this work, we introduce a novel DRL-based preemptive method for further improve the performance of the current studies. Specifically, we try to improve the training of scheduling policy with effective job preemptive mechanisms, and on that basis to optimize job execution cost while meeting users’ expected response time. We introduce the detailed design of our method, and our evaluations demonstrate that our approach can achieve better performance than other scheduling algorithms under different real-time workloads, including the DRL approach.