Mer <i>K</i> ury: Adaptive Resource Allocation to Enhance the <i>K</i> ubernetes Performance for Large-Scale Clusters

As a dominant paradigm in modern web applications, cloud computing has seen a surge in adoption. The deployment of vast and various workloads encapsulated within containers has become ubiquitous across cloud platforms, imposing substantial demands on the supporting infrastructure. However, Kubernetes (k8s), the de facto standard for container orchestration, struggles with low scheduling throughput and high latency in large-scale clusters. The primary challenges are identified as excessive load from read requests and resource contention between co-located components. In this paper, we present MerKury, a general and lightweight framework designed to enhance the Kubernetes performance for large-scale clusters. MerKury employs a dual strategy: first, it preprocesses specific requests to alleviate excessive load; second, it introduces an adaptive resource allocation algorithm to mitigate resource contention. Evaluations across various cluster scales demonstrate that MerKury notably augments node capacity by up to 4.5×, increases scheduling throughput by up to 7.3×, and reduces request latency by 5.6%-57.7%, outperforming vanilla Kubernetes and baseline resource allocation methods.