Multi-objective Container Deployment on Heterogeneous Clusters

Operating system (OS) containers are becoming increasingly popular in cloud computing for improving productivity and code portability. However, existing deployment scheduling solutions mainly treat each container deployment as an independent request, and focus on the single aspect of resource utilization or load balancing, or work on homogeneous clusters. In this paper, we propose a new container deployment algorithm to satisfy multiple objectives on heterogeneous clusters. We analyze the deployment requirements of container-based infrastructure and formulate the deployment problem as a vector bin packing problem with heterogeneous bins. We focus on three objectives: multi-resource guarantee, load balancing, and dependency awareness. The goal of the proposed algorithm is to improve the tradeoff between load balancing and dependency awareness with multi-resource guarantees. Based on the algorithm, we implement a prototype scheduler to deploy containers on heterogeneous clusters. We evaluate our scheduler over a wide range of workload scenarios by simulation, which shows that our scheduler significantly outperforms existing schedulers of the container orchestration platforms.