A Survey on Task Scheduling in Carbon-Aware Container Orchestration

Abstract: The soaring energy demands of large-scale software ecosystems and cloud data centers, accelerated by the intensive training and deployment of LLMs, have driven energy consumption and carbon footprint to unprecedented levels. In response, both industry and academia are increasing efforts to reduce the carbon emissions associated with cloud computing through more efficient task scheduling and infrastructure orchestration. In this work, we present a systematic review of various Kubernetes scheduling strategies, categorizing them into hardware-centric and software-centric, annotating each with its sustainability objectives, and grouping them according to the algorithms they use. We propose a comprehensive taxonomy for cloud task scheduling studies, with a particular focus on the environmental sustainability aspect. We analyze emerging research trends and open challenges, and our findings provide critical insight into the design of sustainable scheduling solutions for next-generation cloud computing systems.