ADAPT: Attention-Driven Domain Adaptation for Inter-cluster Workload Forecasting in Cloud Data Centers

Cloud computing has recently gained popularity due to its cost-effective and high-quality services. Cloud-native systems are expected to host more than 95% of digital workloads. Cloud service providers face two significant challenges: real-time workload predictions and effective resource management. Furthermore, allocating resources over time may result in a suboptimal execution environment due to considerable increases and decreases in workload that follow time-dependent patterns. Recent breakthroughs in deep learning have garnered widespread favor for predicting extremely nonlinear cloud workloads; nevertheless, they have been unable to generalize inter cluster workload forecasting due to inadequate workload data at the beginning of each cluster. Furthermore, the distribution disparity across distinct cluster workloads is caused by a variety of elements, making it difficult to reuse current data or models directly. To overcome these challenges, we propose ADAPT, which relies on Attention-Driven Domain Adaptation. First, we use LSTM architecture as the backbone of our model. Moreover, we construct a strategically shared attention module to transmit relevant knowledge from the source domain to the target domain by inducing domain-invariant latent features and retraining domain-specific features. Lastly, adversarial training is used to increase the model’s resilience and predictive accuracy. Comprehensive experimental evaluations indicate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms existing baselines.