Engineers at IBM Research and Red Hat OpenShift recently joined hands to help researchers tackle two fundamental challenges in today’s constantly changing hybrid cloud field: the first being able to back up their ideas with deep research and the second about assuring the open source community that their idea is important and how it enhances existing software frameworks.

The work (started as open-source projects) comprises two separate components: The first is a set of load-aware scheduler plugins, called Trimaran, that factor in the actual usage on the worker nodes—something Kubernetes doesn’t take into account while the second is a controller that allows developers to automatically resize their containers, called Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA).

“Our collaboration with IBM Research takes an upstream-first approach, helping to fuel innovation in the Kubernetes community,” a blog post quoted Tushar Katarki, Director of Red Hat OpenShift Product Management, as saying.

“When innovation first happens in the Kubernetes community, it provides the opportunity for others to provide feedback. We then build on that feedback and apply it in OpenShift to help solve new customer use cases in the platform. Red Hat is one of the top contributors in the Kubernetes community,” Katarki added.

The collaboration between IBM Research and Red Hat OpenShift has a crucial impact on Red Hat’s customers in terms of “managing their workloads in complex environments which demand flexibility in compute resource utilization,” Red Hat’s Director of OpenShift Engineering, Chris Alfonso, said.

The companies added that PayPal has already begun putting load-aware scheduling into production.