Boreas – A Service Scheduler for Optimal Kubernetes Deployment

The advent of cloud computing radically changed the way organisations operate their applications and allows them to achieve high availability of services at affordable cost. Most cloud-computing platforms fostered Kubernetes for their container orchestration and service management. The scheduler is a key component of Kubernetes, as it is responsible for finding the placement of new service containers when they are deployed. The default scheduler is very fast, although often suboptimal. This can lead to inefficient placement of services, or more severely, inability to deploy. We present a custom Kubernetes scheduler, dubbed Boreas, which is designed to evaluate bursts of deployment requests concurrently. Boreas finds the optimal placements for service containers with their deployment constraints by utilising a configuration optimiser. Results show that Boreas is able to find placements where the default Kubernetes scheduler fails, wasting less computing resources, or proving that no feasible deployment solution is possible.