Hybrid Solution for Container Placement and Load Balancing based on ACO and Bin Packing

Currently, data centers energy consumption in the cloud is attracting a lot of interest. One of the most approaches to optimize energy and cost in data centers is virtualization. Recently, a new type of container-based virtualization has ap-peared, containers are considered very light and modular virtual machines, they offer great flexibility and the possibility of migra-tion from one environment to another, which allows optimizing applications for the cloud. Another approach to saving energy is to consolidate the workload, which is the amount of processing that the computer has to perform at any given time. In this article, we will study the container placement algorithm that takes into account the QoS requirements of different users in order to minimize energy consumption. Thus, we proposed a Hybrid approach for managing resources and workload based on ant colony optimization (ACO) and the first-fit decreasing (FFD) algorithm to avoid unnecessary power consumption. The results of the experiment indicate that using the first-fit decreasing algorithm (FFD) for container placement is better than ant colony optimization especially in a homogeneous systems. On the other hand the ant colony optimization shows very satisfying results in the case of workload management.