Application Reservations

For a resource-intensive application, the Capacity Scheduler creates a reservation on a cluster node if the node's free capacity can meet the particular application's requirements. This ensures that the resources are utilized only by that particular application until the application reservation is fulfilled.

The Capacity Scheduler is responsible for matching free resources in the cluster with the resource requirements of an application. Many times, a scheduling cycle occurs such that even though there are free resources on a node, they are not sized large enough to satisfy the application waiting for a resource at the head of the queue. This typically happens with high-memory applications whose resource demand for Containers is much larger than the typical application running in the cluster. This mismatch can lead to starving these resource-intensive applications.

The Capacity Scheduler reservations feature addresses this issue as follows:

When a node reports in with a finished Container, the Capacity Scheduler selects an appropriate queue to utilize the newly available resources based on capacity and maximum capacity settings.
Within that selected queue, the Capacity Scheduler looks at the applications in a FIFO order along with the user limits. Once a needy application is found, the Capacity Scheduler tries to see if the requirements of that application can be met by the node’s free capacity.
If there is a size mismatch, the Capacity Scheduler immediately creates a reservation on the node for the application’s required Container.
Once a reservation is made for an application on a node, those resources are not used by the Capacity Scheduler for any other queue, application, or Container until the application reservation is fulfilled.
The node on which a reservation is made reports back when enough Containers finish running such that the total free capacity on the node now matches the reservation size. When that happens, the Capacity Scheduler marks the reservation as fulfilled, removes it, and allocates a Container on the node.
In some cases another node fulfills the resources required by the application, so the application no longer needs the reserved capacity on the first node. In this situation, the reservation is simply cancelled.

To prevent the number of reservations from growing in an unbounded manner, and to avoid any potential scheduling deadlocks, the Capacity Scheduler maintains only one active reservation at a time on each node.