MCOP: A Multiple Containers in One Pod Placement Strategy towards Application Completion Time Minimization

As the inter-container data transmission time constitutes a large portion of the overall execution time in contemporary containerized applications, it is natural to group tightly coupled containers into pods to lower the transmission time. However, this container composition leads to longer application waiting time, as all containers within a pod must be started before the pod can provide services. In this paper, we investigate how to group the containers into pods and allocate these pods onto servers with heterogeneous resource capacities and data transmission time, aiming to achieve the minimum completion time. The problem is formulated in quadratic mixed integer programming (QMIP) form and is proven to be NP-hard. Based on the QMIP formulation, we then propose a randomized rounding based multiple containers in one pod (MCOP) placement strategy with reduced computational complexity. Trace-driven experimental results show that MCOP reduces the application completion time by 27.26% to 55.81% compared to state-of-the-art solutions.