A survey of Kubernetes scheduling algorithms

Abstract

As cloud services expand, the need to improve the performance of data center infrastructure becomes more important. High-performance computing, advanced networking solutions, and resource optimization strategies can help data centers maintain the speed and efficiency necessary to provide high-quality cloud services. Running containerized applications is one such optimization strategy, offering benefits such as improved portability, enhanced security, better resource utilization, faster deployment and scaling, and improved integration and interoperability. These benefits can help organizations improve their application deployment and management, enabling them to respond more quickly and effectively to dynamic business needs. Kubernetes is a container orchestration system designed to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. One of its key features is the ability to schedule the deployment and execution of containers across a cluster of nodes using a scheduling algorithm. This algorithm determines the best placement of containers on the available nodes in the cluster. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of various scheduling algorithms in the context of Kubernetes. We characterize and group them into four sub-categories: generic scheduling, multi-objective optimization-based scheduling, AI-focused scheduling, and autoscaling enabled scheduling, and identify gaps and issues that require further research.