Efficient Resource Management on Container as a Service

Docker has been widely adopted as a platform solution for microservice. As the popularity of microservice increases, the importance of fine-tuning the efficiency of resource management in the Docker platform also increases. While Docker’s out-of-box resource management solution provides some generic management capability, more work is required to improve resource utilization and enforce Service Level Agreement (SLA) for critical services. In this research, an efficient Docker resource management scheme, called Adaptive SLA Enforcement, is designed and implemented. For the sake of comparison, we also study and implement three simpler schemes: 1) Fixed Number of Containers, 2) Dynamic Resource Management without SLA Enforcement, 3) Strict SLA Enforcement. We found that the Adaptive SLA Enforcement scheme can deliver efficient resource management with SLA enforcement, thus successfully addressing the deficiencies of the other three schemes.