Bin-packing places multiple application instances or applications on shared machines instead of assigning one application to each virtual machine. Kubernetes uses this approach to improve compute utilization and reduce infrastructure cost while managing workloads through orchestration. section 1.2.2
The practical deployment trade-offs are:
- Shared machines increase efficiency compared with dedicating one virtual machine to each application. section 1.2.2
- Resource pooling lets workloads use temporarily available capacity that other containers have reserved but are not using. section 1.2.2
- Commodity compute nodes combined with workload orchestration can make deployments more price-efficient. section 1.2.2
