Auto-Scaling of Containers: The Impact of Relative and Absolute Metrics

Today, The cloud industry is adopting the container technology both for internal usage and as commercial offering. The use of containers as base technology for large-scale systems opens many challenges in the area of resource management at run-time. This paper addresses the problem of selecting the more appropriate performance metrics to activate auto-scaling actions. Specifically, we investigate the use of relative and absolute metrics. Results demonstrate that, for CPU intense workload, the use of absolute metrics enables more accurate scaling decisions. We propose and evaluate the performance of a new autoscaling algorithm that could reduce the response time of a factor between 0.66 and 0.5 compared to the actual Kubernetes' horizontal auto-scaling algorithm.