Container-VM-PM Architecture: A Novel Architecture for Docker Container Placement

Docker is a mature containerization technique used to perform operating system level virtualization. One open issue in the cloud environment is how to properly choose a virtual machine (VM) to initialize its instance, i.e., container, which is similar to the conventional problem of VM placement towards physical machines (PMs). Current studies mainly focus on container placement and VM placement independently, but rarely take into consideration of the two placements' systematic collaboration. However, we view it as a main reason for scattered distribution of containers in a data center, which finally results in worse physical resource utilization. In this paper, we propose a definition named "Container-VM-PM" architecture and propose a novel container placement strategy by simultaneously taking into account the three involved entities. Furthermore, we model a fitness function for the selection of VM and PM. Simulation experiments show that our method is superior to the existing strategy with regarding to the physical resource utilization.