SLO and Cost-Driven Container Autoscaling on Kubernetes Clusters

Angelo Marchese, Orazio Tomarchio

2025

Abstract

Modern web services must meet critical non-functional requirements such as availability, responsiveness, scalability, and reliability, which are formalized through Service Level Agreements (SLAs). These agreements specify Service Level Objectives (SLOs), which define performance targets like uptime, latency, and throughput, essential for ensuring consistent service quality. Failure to meet SLOs can result in penalties and reputational damage. Service providers also face the challenge of avoiding over-provisioning resources, as this leads to unnecessary costs and inefficient resource use. To address this, autoscaling mechanisms dynamically adjust the number of service replicas to match user demand. However, traditional autoscaling solutions typically rely on low-level metrics (e.g., CPU or memory usage), making it difficult for providers to optimize both SLOs and infrastructure costs. This paper proposes an enhanced autoscaling methodology for containerized workloads in Kubernetes clusters, integrating SLOs with a cost-driven autoscaling policy. This approach overcomes the limitations of conventional autoscaling by making more efficient decisions that balance service-level requirements with operational costs, offering a comprehensive solution for managing containerized applications and their infrastructure in Kubernetes environments. The results, obtained by evaluating a prototype of our system in a testbed environment, show significant advantages over the vanilla Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Marchese A. and Tomarchio O. (2025). SLO and Cost-Driven Container Autoscaling on Kubernetes Clusters. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER; ISBN 978-989-758-747-4, SciTePress, pages 72-79. DOI: 10.5220/0013482100003950

in Bibtex Style

@conference{closer25,
author={Angelo Marchese and Orazio Tomarchio},
title={SLO and Cost-Driven Container Autoscaling on Kubernetes Clusters},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER},
year={2025},
pages={72-79},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013482100003950},
isbn={978-989-758-747-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER
TI - SLO and Cost-Driven Container Autoscaling on Kubernetes Clusters
SN - 978-989-758-747-4
AU - Marchese A.
AU - Tomarchio O.
PY - 2025
SP - 72
EP - 79
DO - 10.5220/0013482100003950
PB - SciTePress