AutoScale: Adaptive QoS-Aware Container-based Cloud Applications Scheduling Framework

Container technologies are widely used in infrastructures to deploy and manage applications in cloud computing environment. As containers are light-weight software, the cluster of cloud applications can easily scale up or down to provide Internet-based services. Container-based applications can well deal with fluctuate workloads by dynamically adjusting physical resources. Current works of scheduling applications often construct applications' performance models with collected historical training data, but these works with static models cannot self-adjust physical resources to meet the dynamic requirements of cloud computing. Thus, we propose a self-adaptive automatic container scheduling framework AutoScale for cloud applications, which uses a feedback-based approach to adjust physical resources by extending, contracting and migrating containers. First, a queue-based performance model for cloud applications is proposed to correlate performance and workloads. Second, a fuzzy Kalman filter is used to adjust the performance model's parameters to accurately predict applications' response time. Third, extension, contraction and migration strategies based on predicted response time are designed to schedule containers at runtime. Furthermore, we have implemented a framework AutoScale with container scheduling strategies. By comparing with current approaches in an experiment environment deployed with typical applications, we observe that AutoScale has advantages in predicting response time, and scheduling containers to guarantee that response time keeps stable in fluctuant workloads.