Elastic Provisioning of Virtual Machines for Container Deployment

Docker containers enable to package an application together with all its dependencies and easily run it in any environment. Thanks to their ease of use and portability, containers are gaining an increasing interest and promise to change the way how Cloud platforms are designed and managed. For their execution in the Cloud, we need to solve the container deployment problem, which deals with the identification of an elastic set of computing machines that can host and execute those containers, while considering the diversity of their requirements. In this paper, we provide a general formulation of the Elastic provisioning of Virtual machines for Container Deployment (for short, EVCD) as an Integer Linear Programming problem, which takes explicitly into account the heterogeneity of container requirements and virtual machine resources. Besides optimizing multiple QoS metrics, EVCD can reallocate containers at runtime, when a QoS improvement can be achieved. Using the proposed formulation as benchmark, we evaluate two well-known heuristics, i.e., greedy first-fit and round-robin, that are usually adopted for solving the container deployment problem.