CoCoScale: Leveraging Layer-wise Scaling to Unlock the Potential of Online LLM Serving

Online large language model (LLM) serving has become the backbone of modern AI applications, powering diverse downstream services through shared hardware clusters. However, modern serving systems frequently encounter highly dynamic workloads characterized by severe workload skewness, where a small fraction of model instances receives the vast majority of traffic. Existing instance-level scaling mechanisms are limited by coarse-grained resource adjustment: scaling up requires the cold-start of full-model replicas, incurring substantial latency, while scaling down leaves the system vulnerable to performance degradation during sudden traffic surges. The key insight of this work is that LLM serving offers a unique opportunity for fine-grained scaling. In this paper, we propose CoCoScale, a layer-wise dynamic scaling mechanism that selectively expands the parallelism of hot layers onto idle resources reclaimed from underutilized devices, enabling elastic data parallelism without altering model architectures or adding hardware overhead. Evaluations demonstrate that CoCoScale significantly reduces cold start latency by 97.9%-99.3% compared to traditional scale up. Under production traces, CoCoScale reduces average latency by 20.7%--28.1% and achieves full Service Level Objective (SLO) attainment, demonstrating superior dynamic adaptability and resource efficiency.