• containers
• kubernetes
• real-time

The growing popularity of containers on the one hand and cloud computing on the other is gradually bringing these two worlds together, creating new software that manages computer clusters based on containers as a fundamental distribution unit. In this context, Kubernetes is becoming increasingly popular and adopted as an open-source platform to automate the deployment, right-sizing, and management of containerized applications. Kubernetes is written in Go, a modern programming language particularly suitable for writing efficient distributed applications, thanks to its compiled nature, along with the wide availability of libraries and tools. Kubernetes, however, does not offer any support for the distribution of containers with real-time features. This thesis deals with integrating into Kubernetes advanced real-time scheduling features available on the Linux kernel today, such as SCHED_DEADLINE, a recently available scheduler for real-time tasks based on Earliest Deadline First. In particular, a hierarchical variant of the latter made available as part of on-going research that aims to use real-time algorithms to control the performance of complex software in a distributed environment. It is possible to specify containers with real-time characteristics, which Kubernetes deploys in a node in the cluster with sufficient real-time computational bandwidth considering the multi-core characteristics of the nodes, ensuring the predictable execution of such containers.