Wasserstein Adversarial Transformer for Cloud Workload Prediction

No. 11: IAAI-22, EAAI-22, AAAI-22 Special Programs and Special Track, Student Papers and Demonstrations

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 36

IAAI Technical Track on Emerging Applications of AI

Predictive VM (Virtual Machine) auto-scaling is a promising technique to optimize cloud applications’ operating costs and performance. Understanding the job arrival rate is crucial for accurately predicting future changes in cloud workloads and proactively provisioning and de-provisioning VMs for hosting the applications. However, developing a model that accurately predicts cloud workload changes is extremely challenging due to the dynamic nature of cloud workloads. Long- Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) models have been developed for cloud workload prediction. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art LSTM model leverages recurrences to predict, which naturally adds complexity and increases the inference overhead as input sequences grow longer. To develop a cloud workload prediction model with high accuracy and low inference overhead, this work presents a novel time-series forecasting model called WGAN-gp Transformer, inspired by the Transformer network and improved Wasserstein-GANs. The proposed method adopts a Transformer network as a generator and a multi-layer perceptron as a critic. The extensive evaluations with real-world workload traces show WGAN- gp Transformer achieves 5× faster inference time with up to 5.1% higher prediction accuracy against the state-of-the-art. We also apply WGAN-gp Transformer to auto-scaling mechanisms on Google cloud platforms, and the WGAN-gp Transformer-based auto-scaling mechanism outperforms the LSTM-based mechanism by significantly reducing VM over-provisioning and under-provisioning rates.

10.1609/aaai.v36i11.21509