Cost-Efficient Orchestration of Containers in Clouds: A Vision, Architectural Elements, and Future Directions

Abstract: This paper proposes an architectural framework for the efficient orchestration of containers in cloud environments. It centres around resource scheduling and rescheduling policies as well as autoscaling algorithms that enable the creation of elastic virtual clusters. In this way, the proposed framework enables the sharing of a computing environment between differing client applications packaged in containers, including web services, offline analytics jobs, and backend pre-processing tasks. The devised resource management algorithms and policies will improve utilization of the available virtual resources to reduce operational cost for the provider while satisfying the resource needs of various types of applications. The proposed algorithms will take factors that are previously omitted by other solutions into consideration, including 1) the pricing models of the acquired resources, 2) and the fault-tolerability of the applications, and 3) the QoS requirements of the running applications, such as the latencies and throughputs of the web services and the deadline of the analytical and pre-processing jobs. The proposed solutions will be evaluated by developing a prototype platform based on one of the existing container orchestration platforms.