BumbleBee: Application-aware adaptation for container orchestration

Application-aware adaptation is the key to maintaining acceptable quality when resources become scarce. Application-oblivious responses to resource scarcity, such as TCP congestion control, may fairly reallocate a diminishing resource pool, but only the application knows how to adjust its fidelity under resource scarcity. Unfortunately, modern container-orchestration platforms like Kubernetes do not offer good support for application-aware adaptation. Thus, this paper presents a set of orchestration extensions to support application-aware adaption called BumbleBee. BumbleBee provides a clean abstraction for making decisions about network data using application semantics. Experiments with a BumbleBee prototype show that it can help a video-analytics application utilize cloud resources when available and operate without interruption when disconnected, and it can help the Fugu video server eliminate all stalling while sacrificing only 6-24% mean resolution.