As microservice architecture is evolving toward Logical Data Center (LDC), accurate forecasting of the microservices indicators can support reasonable resource allocation, thereby ensuring the availability and reliability of cloud service. From a macro perspective, due to the architecture hierarchy, microservices exhibit: 1) collaborative relationships derived from shared functionalities, 2) backup relationships between replicas, and 3) dynamic correlation driven by cooperation. From a micro perspective, there exist causal relationships among indicators within a microservice. That is, workload will first impact system consumption, such as CPU and memory usage, then affect service quality like system latency. Based on these insights, we propose MaMiClif, a macro-micro collaborative learning framework for LDC microservice indicators forecasting. MaMiClif constructs Macro Graph and Micro Matrix to model the microservices dependencies and the causality of indicators. To learn fine-grained indicator dependencies, Indicator-Centric Embedding is leveraged to generate representations for indicator series. We use Heterogeneous Graph Convolution to update workload representations based on the Macro Graph, and adopt Causal Sparse Self-attention to integrate causal strength into the self-attention calculation, enabling a comprehensive exploration of dependencies among indicators. Experiments on two datasets, including LDC_MS, which was collected from the LDC system of Ant Group, demonstrate the effectiveness of MaMiClif.

Accurate workload forecasting is critical for efficient resource management in cloud computing systems, enabling effective scheduling and autoscaling. Despite recent advances with transformer-based forecasting models, challenges remain due to the non-stationary, nonlinear characteristics of workload time series and the long-term dependencies. In particular, inconsistent performance between long-term history and near-term forecasts hinders long-range predictions. This paper proposes a novel framework leveraging self-supervised multiscale representation learning to capture both long-term and near-term workload patterns. The long-term history is encoded through multiscale representations while the near-term observations are modeled via temporal flow fusion. These representations of different scales are fused using an attention mechanism and characterized with normalizing flows to handle non-Gaussian/non-linear distributions of time series. Extensive experiments on 9 benchmarks demonstrate superiority over existing methods.

Predictive autoscaling (autoscaling with workload forecasting) is an important mechanism that supports autonomous adjustment of computing resources in accordance with fluctuating workload demands in the Cloud. In recent works, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been introduced as a promising approach to learn the resource management policies to guide the scaling actions under the dynamic and uncertain cloud environment. However, RL methods face the following challenges in steering predictive autoscaling, such as lack of accuracy in decision-making, inefficient sampling and significant variability in workload patterns that may cause policies to fail at test time. To this end, we propose an end-to-end predictive meta model-based RL algorithm, aiming to optimally allocate resource to maintain a stable CPU utilization level, which incorporates a specially-designed deep periodic workload prediction model as the input and embeds the Neural Process [11, 16] to guide the learning of the optimal scaling actions over numerous application services in the Cloud. Our algorithm not only ensures the predictability and accuracy of the scaling strategy, but also enables the scaling decisions to adapt to the changing workloads with high sample efficiency. Our method has achieved significant performance improvement compared to the existing algorithms and has been deployed online at Alipay, supporting the autoscaling of applications for the world-leading payment platform.