Ideally, highly-threaded I/O intensive Linux containers running on Kubernetes would have all the CPU time they need. But just how compatible is that goal with reality? To find the answer – and optimize Linux containers – application developers and DevOps teams must understand how Linux schedules tasks and allocates them CPU time.
The goal behind “real-time” containers is enabling your most important containers – those with mission-critical requirements around time-sensitive performance and reliability – to share the same hardware as non-real-time containers. But before committing to this strategy, it’s important to first determine how practical and achievable this is. In a strategy reliant on real-time containers, under-resourcing those containers could produce application performance shortfalls and hamper security efforts.