Availability-Aware Container Scheduler for Application Services in Cloud

Cloud is a popular paradigm for providing online computing services to the end users. Recently many of the cloud service providers use containers instead of Virtual Machines (VMs) to host the applications. Using containers raises the application service availability concerns. Availability is a nonfunctional requirement that refers to the percentage of time the service is available for the end user. Scheduling containers (host application) on physical/virtual hosts has direct impact on the availability of the application service that is provided to the end user. According to the best of our knowledge, the existing container scheduling solutions do not directly address the availability of the application service. In this article we propose a new Availability-Aware container scheduling strategy that aims to increase the availability level of the application service in the cloud container-based platform. The strategy selects VMs and hosts that have higher availability values within constraints to schedule the containers in efficient way. We compare the proposed strategy with other container scheduling strategies that are used by Docker container platform. The results shown that the Availability-Aware strategy achieves higher service availability levels, and acceptable physical host CPU utilization.