A Kubernetes-Based Monitoring Platform for Dynamic Cloud Resource Provisioning

Recently, more and more network operators have deployed cloud environment to implement network operations centers that monitor the status of their large-scale mobile or wireline networks. Typically, the cloud environment adopts container-based virtualization that uses Docker for container packaging with Kubernetes for multihost Docker container management. In such a container-based environment, it is important that the Kubernetes can dynamically monitor the resource requirements and/or usage of the running applications, and then adjust the resource provisioned to the managed containers accordingly. Currently, Kubernetes provides a naive dynamic resource-provisioning mechanism which only considers CPU utilization and thus is not effective. This paper aims at developing a generic platform to facilitate dynamic resource-provisioning based on Kubernetes. Our platform contains the following three features. First, our platform includes a comprehensive monitoring mechanism that integrates and provides the relatively complete system resource utilization and application QoS metrics to the resource-provisioning algorithm to make the better provisioning strategy. Second, our platform modularizes the operation of dynamic resource-provisioning operation so that the users can easily deploy a newly designed algorithm to replace an existing one in our platform. Third, the dynamic resource-provisioning operation in our platform is implemented as a control loop which can consequently be applied to all the running application following a user-defined time interval without other manual configuration.