A Kubernetes-Based Monitoring Platform for Dynamic Cloud Resource Provisioning

Abstract

Recently, more and more network operators have deployed cloud environment to implement network operations centers that monitor the status of their large-scale mobile or wireline networks. Typically, the cloud environment adopts container-based virtualization that uses Docker for container packaging with Kubernetes for multihost Docker container management. In such a container-based environment, it is important that the Kubernetes can dynamically monitor the resource requirements and/or usage of the running applications, and then adjust the resource provisioned to the managed containers accordingly. Currently, Kubernetes provides a naive dynamic resource-provisioning mechanism which only considers CPU utilization and thus is not effective. This paper aims at developing a generic platform to facilitate dynamic resource-provisioning based on Kubernetes. Our platform contains the following three features. First, our platform includes a comprehensive monitoring mechanism that integrates and provides the relatively complete system resource utilization and application QoS metrics to the resource-provisioning algorithm to make the better provisioning strategy. Second, our platform modularizes the operation of dynamic resource- provisioning operation so that the users can easily deploy a newly designed algorithm to replace an existing one in our platform. Third, the dynamic resource-provisioning operation in our platform is implemented as a control loop which can consequently be applied to all the running application following a user-defined time interval without other manual configuration.