SAFC - Scheduling and Allocation Framework for Containers in a Cloud Environment.

Currently, the intrinsic nature of cloud computing offers new opportunities for scheduling unit of works as containers. In this paper we present a new Scheduling and Allocation Framework for Containers (SAFC) based on an economic model. The novelty of our framework is to gives the possibility to specify ranges on the resources demand for containers instead of specifying a fixed amount of resource. Thus, the goal and the new developments in this paper are to propose a general framework which dynamically schedules containers and decides, on the fly, the number of resources that must be allocated to optimize the use of cloud resources and to maximize the number of containers executed. The key idea of the paper is in relaxing strict constraints on the requested number of resources and on letting the system to adjust the amount of resources according to the execution context, such as the peaks of activities. The SAFC framework is evaluated using the Linux Containers (LXC) inside the Grid’5000 testbed.