Real-time Container Orchestration Based on Time-utility Functions

Container-based virtualization is a lightweight deployment solution within heterogeneous Fog and Edge Computing (FEC) systems. When used in real-time FEC applications, orchestration is needed to adapt to variations in system behavior, transient overload scenarios, and changes in resource availability. Container-based orchestration can efficiently and automatically deploy, redimension, and relocate containers according to the measured real-time performance of critical applications. This paper presents a highly configurable orchestration framework for real-time containers that improves the scalability and expressiveness of state-of-the-art approaches. We propose three different heuristics for the offline placement and dimensioning of containers on nodes that scale with the size of modern industrial systems and enhance the decision-making of the online hierarchical controller to include time-utility functions which can model more accurately the usefulness of results in the case of deadline misses. We show our framework's performance and efficiency using synthetic test cases and a real-world test bed.