The Forecaster: Teaching the Cluster to See 30 Minutes Ahead
The previous post decomposed the scaling problem into a Commander (budget allocation across domains) and Soldiers (per-domain replica execution). The Commander’s proactive character — the thing that separates HiRL-Scale from “reactive RL that is faster than HPA” — comes from a single component: the traffic forecaster. I use a Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) to produce per-domain RPS forecasts at 5, 15, and 30-minute horizons. I feed the 80th-percentile forecast into the Commander’s observation. I train the forecaster offline and freeze it during RL training. Every one of those choices bit me. ...