Communication Aware Scheduling of Microservices-based Applications on Kubernetes Clusters

Edge computing paradigm has enabled new application categories with low latency requirements. Container technologies are increasingly spreading to provide flexible and scalable services also within these dynamic environments. However, scheduling distributed microservices applications in the Cloud-to-Edge continuum is a challenging problem, considering the instability and limited network connectivity of Edge infrastructure. Existing container orchestration systems, like Kubernetes, allow to ease the deployment and scheduling of distributed applications in Cloud data centers but their scheduling strategy presents some limitations when dealing with latency critical applications, because it does not consider application communication requirements. In this work we propose an extension of the default Kubernetes scheduler that takes into account microservices communication requirements, modeled through the use of the TOSCA language, traffic history and network latency metrics in order to assign node scores when scheduling each application Pod. A qualitative analysis of the proposed scheduler is presented with a use case.