Enabling the Rescheduling of Containerized Workloads in an Ad Hoc Cross-Organizational Collaboration

A group of organizations wishing to collaborate urgently, for example in case of a crisis, need to have a way to quickly deploy applications which enable them to speed up a potentially crisis-resolving decision-making process. A cross-organizational Kubernetes cluster, which is orchestrated by a central operator, allows to initiate these deployments in an ad hoc way. Performance issues may however arise at runtime, for example, a video pipeline belonging to a CCTV camera may produce a too low number of frames per second. The ad hoc cross-organizational collaboration case is especially prone to such issues as the set of candidate nodes and the environment in which they run may not be fully known to the operator. This article therefore motivates and describes the usage of a probe swarm architecture, which allows the operator to quickly generate an overview of the resource capabilities of a set of nodes, by executing code fragments locally. The obtained measurements can then enable the operator to decide on rescheduling operations. Evaluation of an illustrative probe swarm intervention shows that the performance of an example application could improve with factor five, ten or hundred when the pod would be rescheduled. This indicates that the proposed probe swarm architecture may complement other performance bottleneck detection techniques to improve performance of applications that need to be deployed urgently.