Distributed Computing Infrastructure Based on Dynamic Container Clusters

Vladimir Korkhov, Sergey Kobyshev, Artem Krosheninnikov, Alexander B. Degtyarev, Alexander V. Bogdanov

Abstract: Modern scientific and business applications often require fast provisioning of an infrastructure tailored to particular application needs. In turn, actual physical infrastructure contains resources that might be underutilized by applications if allocated in dedicated mode (e.g., a process does not utilize provided CPU or network connection fully). Traditional virtualization technologies can solve the problem partially, however, overheads on bootstrapping a virtual infrastructure for each application and sharing physical resources might be significant. In this paper we propose and evaluate an approach to create and configure dedicated computing environment tailored to the needs of particular applications, which is based on light-weight virtualization also known as containers. We investigate available capabilities to model and create dynamic container-based virtual infrastructures sharing a common set of physical resources, and evaluate their performance on a set of test applications with different requirements.