Cost-efficient scheduling algorithms based on beetle antennae search for containerized applications in Kubernetes clouds

With the development of cloud-native technologies, Kubernetes becomes the standard of fact for container scheduling. Kubernetes provides service discovery and scheduling of containers, load balancing, service self-healing, elastic scaling, storage volumes, etc. Although Kubernetes is mature with advanced features, it does not consider reducing the cost in Kubernetes clouds using the factor of communication frequent between pods while scheduling pods, nor does it have a rescheduling mechanism to save cost. Hence, we propose a cost-efficient scheduling algorithm and a rescheduling algorithm to reduce the cost of communication-intensive and periodically changing web applications deployed in Kubernetes, respectively. Network communication-intensive pods are scheduled to the same node by the scheduling algorithm based on Improved Beetle Antennae Search. According to the changing pod intimacy relationship, the rescheduling algorithm is completed through the replacement of new and old pods to reduce the cost. In addition, this paper evaluates the proposed algorithms in terms of cost and performance on a Kubernetes cloud. The result shows that the cost consumption of Kubernetes clusters in cloud environment is reduced by 20.97% on average compared with the default Kubernetes framework.