Picture me as a young teenager. After school, we’d go a courtyard and play soccer. That was an exciting sight. A random number of us to be running around the yard without any orchestration. There was no offense and no defense. We’d just run after a ball. Everyone moves forward towards the ball, someone kicks it to the left, and we move in that direction, only to start running back because someone kicked the ball again. The strategy was simple. Run towards the ball, kick it if you can, wherever you can, repeat. To this day I do not understand how did anyone manage to score. It was a complete randomness applied to a bunch of kids. There was no strategy, no plan, and no understanding that winning required coordination. Even a goalkeeper would be in random locations on the field. If he’d catch the ball around the goal he’s guarding, he’d continue running with the ball in front of him. Most of the goals were scored by shooting at an empty goalpost. It was “every man for himself” type of ambition. Each one of us hoped to score and bring glory to his or her name. Fortunately, the main objective was to have fun so winning as a team did not matter that much. If we were a “real” team, we’d need a coach. We’d need someone to tell us what the strategy is, who should do what, and when to go into the offense or fall back to defend the goalpost. We’d need someone to orchestrate us. The field (a cluster) had a random number of people (services) with the common goal (to win). Since everyone could join the game at any time, the number of people (services) was continually changing. Someone would be injured and would have to be replaced or, when there was no replacement, the rest of us would have to take over his tasks (self-healing). Those football games can be easily translated into clusters. Just as we needed someone to tell us what to do (a coach), clusters need something to orchestrate all the services and resources. Both need not only to make up-front decisions, but also to continuously watch the game/cluster, and adapt the strategy/scheduling depending on the internal and external influences. We needed a coach and clusters need a scheduler. They need a framework that will decide where a service should be deployed and make sure that it maintains the desired run-time specification.
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