  The edge-cloud system has the potential to combine the advantages of
heterogeneous devices and truly realize ubiquitous computing. However, for
service providers to guarantee the Service-Level-Agreement (SLA) priorities,
the complex networked environment brings inherent challenges such as
multi-resource heterogeneity, resource competition, and networked system
dynamics. In this paper, we design a framework for the edge-cloud system,
namely EdgeMatrix, to maximize the throughput while guaranteeing various SLA
priorities. First, EdgeMatrix introduces Networked Multi-agent Actor-Critic
(NMAC) algorithm to redefine physical resources as logically isolated resource
combinations, i.e., resource cells. Then, we use a clustering algorithm to
group the cells with similar characteristics into various sets, i.e., resource
channels, for different channels can offer different SLA guarantees. Besides,
we design a multi-task mechanism to solve the problem of joint service
orchestration and request dispatch (JSORD) among edge-cloud clusters,
significantly reducing the runtime than traditional methods. To ensure
stability, EdgeMatrix adopts a two-time-scale framework, i.e., coordinating
resources and services at the large time scale and dispatching requests at the
small time scale. The real trace-based experimental results verify that
EdgeMatrix can improve system throughput in complex networked environments,
reduce SLA violations, and significantly reduce the runtime than traditional
methods.
