NetMARKS: Network Metrics-AwaRe Kubernetes Scheduler Powered by Service Mesh

Container technology has revolutionized the way software is being packaged and run. The telecommunications industry, now challenged with the 5G transformation, views containers as the best way to achieve agile infrastructure that can serve as a stable base for high throughput and low latency for 5G edge applications. These challenges make optimal scheduling of performance-sensitive containerized workflows a matter of emerging importance. Meanwhile, the wide adoption of Kubernetes across industries has placed it as a de-facto standard for container orchestration. Several attempts have been made to improve Kubernetes scheduling, but the existing solutions either do not respect current scheduling rules or only considered a static infrastructure viewpoint.To address this, we propose NetMARKS - a novel approach to Kubernetes pod scheduling that uses dynamic network metrics collected with Istio Service Mesh. This solution improves Kubernetes scheduling while being fully backward compatible. We validated our solution using different workloads and processing layouts. Based on our analysis, NetMARKS can reduce application response time up to 37 percent and save up to 50 percent of inter-node bandwidth in a fully automated manner. This significant improvement is crucial to Kubernetes adoption in 5G use cases, especially for multi-access edge computing and machine-to-machine communication.