Menu
Menu
John describes Borg, the cluster management system which supports almost all the computation that Google does, and has informed the development of the open-source Kubernetes system.
Companion article:
Large-scale cluster management at Google with Borg. Abhishek Verma, Luis Pedrosa, Madhukar R. Korupolu, David Oppenheimer, Eric Tune, and John Wilkes. European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), April 2015 (Bordeaux, France). [links: ACM DL, bibtex]
Google's Borg system is a cluster manager that runs hundreds of thousands of jobs, from many thousands of different applications, across a number of clusters each with up to tens of thousands of machines.
It achieves high utilization by combining admission control, efficient task-packing, over-commitment, and machine sharing with process-level performance isolation. It supports high-availability applications with runtime features that minimize fault-recovery time, and scheduling policies that reduce the probability of correlated failures. Borg simplifies life for its users by offering a declarative job specification language, name service integration, real-time job monitoring, and tools to analyze and simulate system behavior.
We present a summary of the Borg system architecture and features, important design decisions, a quantitative analysis of some of its policy decisions, and a qualitative examination of lessons learned from a decade of operational experience with it.