Borg: the Next Generation

This paper analyzes a newly-published trace that covers 8 different Borg clusters for the month of May 2019. The trace enables researchers to explore how scheduling works in large-scale production compute clusters. We highlight how Borg has evolved and perform a longitudinal comparison of the newly-published 2019 trace against the 2011 trace, which has been highly cited within the research community. Our findings show that Borg features such as alloc sets are used for resource-heavy workloads; automatic vertical scaling is effective; job-dependencies account for much of the high failure rates reported by prior studies; the workload arrival rate has increased, as has the use of resource over-commitment; the workload mix has changed, jobs have migrated from the free tier into the best-effort batch tier; the workload exhibits an extremely heavy-tailed distribution where the top 1% of jobs consume over 99% of resources; and there is a great deal of variation between different clusters.