A systematic review on recent methods of scheduling and load balancing for containers in distributed environments

The concept of containers is widely used in cloud computing environments due to perceived benefits linked to packaging and deploying software efficiently. Due to the unprecedented usage of containers, it became indispensable to manage them efficiently. In other words, container scheduling and load-balancing strategies have assumed significance in distributed environments. In this paper, a systematic review is presented that covers ninety-five peer-reviewed research articles from 2012 to 2023, providing a comprehensive understanding of the current state of research in this field. This review synthesizes new insights and knowledge, shedding light on the challenges in container load balancing, various existing methods of container placement, container orchestration, scheduling, load balancing, cluster management, dynamic resource allocation, and micro-services. This paper also investigates load balancing for containers in fog or edge computing environments connected to cloud computing. The study thus synthesizes new knowledge on diversified aspects of containers and their load balancing in cloud environments, paving the way for further investigation and the realization of more optimal container scheduling and load-balancing approaches.