Stratus: cost-aware container scheduling in the public cloud

Stratus is a new cluster scheduler specialized for orchestrating batch job execution on virtual clusters, dynamically allocated collections of virtual machine instances on public IaaS platforms. Unlike schedulers for conventional clusters, Stratus focuses primarily on dollar cost considerations, since public clouds provide effectively unlimited, highly heterogeneous resources allocated on demand. But, since resources are charged-for while allocated, Stratus aggressively packs tasks onto machines, guided by job runtime estimates, trying to make allocated resources be either mostly full (highly utilized) or empty (so they can be released to save money). Simulation experiments based on cluster workload traces from Google and TwoSigma show that Stratus reduces cost by 17-44% compared to state-of-the-art approaches to virtual cluster scheduling.