Hamed Hamzeh and Parisa Vahdatian 2026. Preprint: MAS-H2: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent System for Holistic Cloud-Native Autoscaling. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2603.07607
| Title | Preprint: MAS-H2: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent System for Holistic Cloud-Native Autoscaling |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hamed Hamzeh and Parisa Vahdatian |
| Description | Autoscaling in cloud-native platforms like Kubernetes is reactive and metric-driven, leading to a strategic void problem. This comes from the decoupling of higher-level business policies from lower-level resource provisioning. The strategic void, coupled with a fragmented coordination of pod and node scaling, can lead to significant resource waste and performance degradation under dynamic workloads. In this paper, we present MAS-H2, a new hierarchical multi-agent system that addresses the challenges of autonomic cloud resource management with a complete end-to-end solution. MAS-H2 systematically decomposes the control problem into three layers: a Strategic Agent that formalises business policies (e.g., cost vs. performance) into a global utility function; Planning Agents that produce a joint, proactive scaling plan for pods and nodes with time-series forecasting; and Execution Agents that execute the scaling plan. We built and tested a MAS-H2 prototype as a Kubernetes Operator on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to benchmark it against the native Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) and Cluster Autoscaler (CA) baselines under two realistic, spiky, and stress-inducing workload scenarios. The results show that the MAS-H2 system maintained application CPU usage under 40% for predictable Heartbeat workloads. This resulted in over 50% less sustained CPU stress than the native HPA baseline, which typically operated above 80%. The MAS-H2 system demonstrated proactive planning in a volatile Chaotic Flash Sale scenario by filtering transient noise and deploying more replicas compared to HPA. It reduced peak CPU load by 55% without under-provisioning. Beyond performance, MAS-H2 seamlessly performed a zero-downtime strategic migration between two cost- and performance-optimised infrastructures. |
| Year | 2026 |
| Output media | arXiv preprint |
| Publisher | arXiv |
| Publication dates | |
| Published | 08 Mar 2026 |
| Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2603.07607 |
| Web address (URL) | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07607 |