A New Docker Swarm Scheduling Strategy

Abstract

This paper presents our initial ideas for a new scheduling strategy integrated in the Docker Swarm scheduler. The aim of this paper is to introduce the basic concepts and the implementation details of a new scheduling strategy based on different Service Level Agreement (SLA) classes. This strategy is proposed to answer to the problems of companies that manage a private infrastructure of machines, and would like to optimize the scheduling of several requests submitted online by users. Each request is a demand of creating a container. Currently, Docker Swarm has three basic scheduling strategies (spread, binpack and random), each one executes a container with a fixed number of resources. However, the novelty of our new strategy consists in using the SLA class of the user to provision a container that must execute the service, based on a dynamic computation of the number of CPU cores that must be allocated to the container according to the user SLA class and the load of the parallel machines in the infrastructure. Testing of our new strategy is conducted, by emulation, on different part of our general framework and it demonstrates the potential of our approach for further development.