Network-Aware Container Scheduling in Multi-Tenant Data Center

Network management on multi-tenant container-based data center has critical impact on performance. Tenants encapsulate applications in containers abstracting away details on hosting infrastructures, and entrust data center management framework with the provisioning of network Quality-of-Service requirements. In this paper, we propose a network-aware multi-criteria container scheduler to jointly process containers and network requirements. We introduce a new Mixed Integer Linear Programming formulation for network-aware scheduling encompassing both tenants and providers metrics. We describe two GPU-accelerated modules to address the complexity barrier of the problem and efficiently process scheduling requests. Our experiments show that our scheduling approach accounting for both network and containers outperforms traditional algorithms used by containers orchestrators.

I. Introduction

Container-based virtualization offers a lightweight mechanism to host and manage large-scale distributed applications for big data processing, edge computing, stream processing, among others. Multiple tenants encapsulate applications' environments in containers, abstracting away details of operating systems, library versions, and server configurations. With containers, data center (DC) management becomes application-oriented [1] in contrast to server-oriented when using virtual machines. Several technologies are used to provide connections between containers, such as virtual switches, bridges, and overlay networks [2]. Yet, containers are a catalyst for network management complexity. Network segmentation, bandwidth reservation, and latency control are essential requirements to support distributed applications, but container management frameworks still lack appropriate tools to support Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements for network provisioning [1].