An optimized approach for container deployment driven by a two-stage load balancing mechanism

PLoS One. 2025 Jan 10;20(1):e0317039. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0317039. eCollection 2025.

Abstract

Lightweight container technology has emerged as a fundamental component of cloud-native computing, with the deployment of containers and the balancing of loads on virtual machines representing significant challenges. This paper presents an optimization strategy for container deployment that consists of two stages: coarse-grained and fine-grained load balancing. In the initial stage, a greedy algorithm is employed for coarse-grained deployment, facilitating the distribution of container services across virtual machines in a balanced manner based on resource requests. The subsequent stage utilizes a genetic algorithm for fine-grained resource allocation, ensuring an equitable distribution of resources to each container service on a single virtual machine. This two-stage optimization enhances load balancing and resource utilization throughout the system. Empirical results indicate that this approach is more efficient and adaptable in comparison to the Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) Algorithm, the Simulated Annealing (SA) Algorithm, and the GWO-SA Algorithm, significantly improving both resource utilization and load balancing performance on virtual machines.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Cloud Computing*

Grants and funding

This research was supported by Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. LQ24F020023. This Project is Supported by Ningbo Natural Science Foundation (No.2023J180). A Project Supported by Scientific Research Fund of Zhejiang Provincial Education Department (No.Y202351645). Scientific Research Project Funded by Ningbo University of Technology (No.2040011540019). Scientific Research Incubation Program of Ningbo University of Technology (No. 2022TS23). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. There was no additional external funding received for this study.