HPKS: High Performance Kubernetes Scheduling for Dynamic Blockchain Workloads in Cloud Computing

Emerging blockchain technologies have been increasingly popular and reforming our daily lives. Fusing blockchain technology with existing cloud systems has a great benefits in both improving the functionality/performance and guaranteeing the security/privacy. However, most existing commercial systems fail to address the characteristics of PoS blockchain applications in the cloud. In real-world scenarios, jobs/pods may arrive and leave due to the workload changes. Traditionally, the selection process is based on the state of the workers, e.g., resource availability and specifications of pods. In this paper, we not only provide an optimal solution for offline workloads management which minimizes the number of used workers to reduce the total computational resource demand, but also propose a high performance Kubernetes scheduling scheme HPKS, which maximizes the utilization of workers. Specifically, extensive experiments based on real PoS blockchain applications shows that HPKS reduces the average worker nodes usage by 13.0%. Additionally, the overall increase of Makespan using HPKS is less than 3% when compared to the default scheduler available in Kubernetes.