MonkeyKing: Adaptive Parameter Tuning on Big Data Platforms with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Choosing the right parameter configurations for recurring jobs running on big data analytics platforms is difficult because there can be hundreds of possible parameter configurations to pick from. Even the selection of parameter configurations is based on different types of applications and user requirements. The difference between the best configuration and the worst configuration can have a performance impact of more than 10 times. However, parameters of big data platforms are not independent, which makes it a challenge to automatically identify the optimal configuration for a broad spectrum of applications. To alleviate these problems, we proposed MonkeyKing, a system that leverages past experience and collects new information to adjust parameter configurations of big data platforms. It can recommend key parameters, which have strong impact on performance according to job types, and then combine deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to optimize key parameters to improve job performance. We choose the current popular deep Q-network (DQN) structure and its four improved algorithms, including DQN, Double DQN, Dueling DQN, and the combined Double DQN and Dueling DQN, and finally found that the combined Double DQN and Dueling DQN has a better effect. Our experiments and evaluations on Spark show that performance can be improved by ∼25% under best conditions.