Optimizing Microservices Performance with AI-Driven Load Balancing
Microservices systems often face performance issues when workloads fluctuate, and services degrade over time. Traditional load balancing methods such as Round Robin or Latency-Aware routing do not adapt to changing conditions, which can lead to higher latency and increased error rates. This paper evaluates adaptive decision-making algorithms for request routing, including Deep Q-Network (DQN), Upper Confidence Bound (UCB), Thompson Sampling, and traditional heuristics. Experiments were executed on a production-scale cloud environment (Runpod, 16 vCPUs, 128 GB RAM) for 4 hours per algorithm with 50 concurrent users, generating more than 600,000 requests per experiment. Results show that contextual bandit algorithms significantly outperform deep reinforcement learning. UCB achieved a 0.097 % error rate and a median latency of 220 ms, compared to DQN which produced an 11.32 % error rate and instability during training. Latency-Aware routing performed well but could not match the adaptability of contextual bandits. These findings demonstrate that simpler learning algorithms such as UCB and Thompson Sampling provide faster adaptation, lower error rates, and better stability than deep RL approaches in microservices routing tasks.