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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wanigasooriya, Chamath, Ekanayake, Indrajith
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11017
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author Wanigasooriya, Chamath
Ekanayake, Indrajith
author_facet Wanigasooriya, Chamath
Ekanayake, Indrajith
contents Cloud native architecture is about building and running scalable microservice applications to take full advantage of the cloud environments. Managed Kubernetes is the powerhouse orchestrating cloud native applications with elastic scaling. However, traditional Kubernetes autoscalers are reactive, meaning the scaling controllers adjust resources only after they detect demand within the cluster and do not incorporate any predictive measures. This can lead to either over-provisioning and increased costs or under-provisioning and performance degradation. We propose NimbusGuard, an open-source, Kubernetes-based autoscaling system that leverages a deep reinforcement learning agent to provide proactive autoscaling. The agents perception is augmented by a Long Short-Term Memory model that forecasts future workload patterns. The evaluations were conducted by comparing NimbusGuard against the built-in scaling controllers, such as Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, and the event-driven autoscaler KEDA. The experimental results demonstrate how NimbusGuard's proactive framework translates into superior performance and cost efficiency compared to existing reactive methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_11017
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NimbusGuard: A Novel Framework for Proactive Kubernetes Autoscaling Using Deep Q-Networks
Wanigasooriya, Chamath
Ekanayake, Indrajith
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Artificial Intelligence
C.2.4; C.4
Cloud native architecture is about building and running scalable microservice applications to take full advantage of the cloud environments. Managed Kubernetes is the powerhouse orchestrating cloud native applications with elastic scaling. However, traditional Kubernetes autoscalers are reactive, meaning the scaling controllers adjust resources only after they detect demand within the cluster and do not incorporate any predictive measures. This can lead to either over-provisioning and increased costs or under-provisioning and performance degradation. We propose NimbusGuard, an open-source, Kubernetes-based autoscaling system that leverages a deep reinforcement learning agent to provide proactive autoscaling. The agents perception is augmented by a Long Short-Term Memory model that forecasts future workload patterns. The evaluations were conducted by comparing NimbusGuard against the built-in scaling controllers, such as Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, and the event-driven autoscaler KEDA. The experimental results demonstrate how NimbusGuard's proactive framework translates into superior performance and cost efficiency compared to existing reactive methods.
title NimbusGuard: A Novel Framework for Proactive Kubernetes Autoscaling Using Deep Q-Networks
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Artificial Intelligence
C.2.4; C.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11017