JointScaler: A Hierarchical Multi-Indicator Distribution Forecasting Approach for Uncertainty-Aware Joint Scaling in Cloud Services

Abstract

Proactive scaling improves cloud resource efficiency by forecasting system-relevant indicators and dynamically provisioning resources to maximize utilization while satisfying quality requirements. Existing approaches forecast service indicators in isolation, ignore forecasting uncertainty, and scale resource types independently, violating bundled resource constraints and degrading service quality. Therefore, we propose JointScaler, a learning-based framework for multi-indicator distribution forecasting and uncertainty-aware scaling. It captures inter-indicator dependencies via hierarchical attention, models dynamic uncertainties with normalizing flows, and leverages full predictive distributions to optimize bundled resource allocations under quality requirements. Evaluated on 4 real-world datasets, JointScaler improves point and distribution forecasting accuracy by 5.87% and 14.74%, outperforming 12 advanced baselines. In a week-long A/B test on a payment application’s cloud platform, it reduced GPU and CPU usage by 2,400+ and 37,000+ hours with stable service quality, delivering significant economic benefits.