More Sharing, More Benefits? A Study of Library Sharing in Container-Based Infrastructures.

Container-based infrastructures have surged in popularity, offering advantages in agility and scaling, while also presenting new challenges in resource utilization due to unnecessary library duplication. In this paper, we consider sharing libraries across containers, and study the impact of such a strategy on overall resource requirements, scheduling, and utilization. Our analysis and simulations suggest significant benefits arising from library sharing. Furthermore, a small fraction of libraries shared between any two containers, on average, is enough to reap most of the benefits, and even naive schedulers, such as a First Fit scheduler, succeed at doing so. We also propose a score maximization, mixed-integer linear-programming scheduler for handling bulk request arrivals (such as large jobs composed of many smaller tasks), which compares favorably against state-of-the-art schedulers in these scenarios.