Advancing Orchestration: Leveraging Distance Functions to Meet Application Intents
Maria Daniela Leite de Souza, Thijs Metsch · 2024
True orchestration and management systems should manage applications based on their Service Level Objectives (SLOs), but this presents two key challenges: a) understanding how close an application’s current state is to its desired state, and b) defined by competing SLOs - and encapsulating user-defined priorities - where certain objectives may hold more weight, to enable effective arbitration. To address these challenges, we introduce a set of distance functions that measure the gap between an application’s current and desired states. These functions can guide planning and scheduling algorithms, refine utility and cost functions, and support arbitration between competing objectives. Implemented in Kubernetes-based systems, these distance functions enhance planning and scheduling efficiency, optimizing orchestration stacks to meet SLOs with greater precision and higher levels of efficiency.