Workload-aware resource management for energy efficient heterogeneous Docker containers

Recently, containerization has received a lot of attention from world's major vendors such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft as a good alternative to traditional hypervisor based virtualization for clouds because of its lightweight and rapid deployment of multi-tenant services. Especially, Docker container is the most noteworthy one among serveral container technologies including Linux container (LXC), Warden container, OpenVZ and so on. Similar to the traditional cloud environments, the energy consumption is still a large part of the overall operating expense of Docker container based cloud datacenters. In this paper, we propose Workload aware Energy Efficient Container (WEEC) brokering system to save the energy consumption caused by running container applications while guaranteeing acceptable performance level. In addition, we show the power and performance heterogeneity of several Docker container servers from experimental results with physical power metering devices to identify the performance benefits of our proposed system.