KubeCon + CloudNative North America 2021

Kubernetes is a popular solution for container orchestration and cluster management. Cluster management creates opportunity to improve resource utilization which can provide an organization with cost savings. To achieve this, we can make the native Kubernetes scheduler aware of the gap between its declarative resource allocation model and actual node resource utilization. We can pack pods more efficiently in a lower number of nodes considering real load of nodes. Native scheduler on the other hand only considers pod requests and allocable resources on nodes with its default plugins. We introduced two plugins to the scheduler community - TargetLoadPacking and LoadVariationRiskBalancing under the Trimaran framework to address this problem with collaboration between PayPal and IBM. The plugins provide scheduling support for all pod QoS guarantees.