kdb Insights Enterprise Overprovisioning
Overview
Scaling nodes in Kubernetes clusters can be slow due to the time taken for new nodes to be provisioned. This time taken can include waiting on rook-ceph to become available along with mounting volumes. A cluster may need to scale if all nodes in the cluster are running at their full capacity, or if there is some burst processing or HA needed.
To reduce the time needed to wait for another node to be provisioned, we can overprovision the cluster by scheduling low priority pods with resource requests that cause the cluster to scale. For example, sizing the resource request of the overprovisioning pod to match size of a node, will scale an extra node.
The KX Overprovisioning chart is responsible for initializing lower-priority pods which should request the majority resources of a node on a cluster. The pods are used for the reservation of resources.
If an over request of resources is triggered, the overprovisioning pods would be evicted to free up resources for pending pods. They would then trigger a new node to be scheduled to started.
Pod Priority
Pod Priority is a Kubernetes features that allow you to assign priorities to pods. Priority indicates the importance of a Pod relative to other Pods. When a cluster is low on memory/cpu resources, lower-priority pods are removed/evicted by the scheduler. This is done in order to make space for higher-priority pods waiting to be scheduled.
Priority class value
The priority class value used by the chart should be set to a low value. The default is deliberately set to a large negative number to ensure it will be evicted by other pods. Ensure that this value is lower than the other pods in your application.
# Specify details of the priority class create
priorityclass:
name: "kxi-low-priority"
value: -200000
ReplicaCount and Resources
To use the chart, you must provide the following resource
values. These should align with the maximum resources of a node within their cluster.
variable | type | default | description |
---|---|---|---|
replicaCount |
int |
1 |
Number of nodes to provision via overprovisioning pod replicas |
resources.requests.cpu |
string |
Requested CPU for the Overprovisioning | |
resources.requests.memory |
string |
Requested memory for the Overprovisioning |
The example yaml below, defines how a user would overprovision 2 additional nodes.The overprovisioning pods are requesting 8 CPUs and 64GB of memory. This is assuming that resources defined on each of the nodes are slightly larger, therefor the overprovisioning pods are requesting the majority resources.
replicaCount: 2
resources:
requests:
cpu: 8
memory: 64Gi
Prerequisites
In order to run the chart you will need access to the kdb Insights Enterprise Nexus repository and an associated image pull secret for your cluster. If you have already installed kdb Insights Enterprise, you can re-use the same secret.
Confirm the repo has been added
$ helm repo ls
NAME URL
kx-insights https://nexus.dl.kx.com/repository/kx-insights-charts/
Confirm the image pull secret exists
$ kubectl get secrets
NAME TYPE DATA AGE
kxi-nexus-pull-secret kubernetes.io/dockerconfigjson 1 7d20h
Otherwise the easiest way to setup the prerequisites is to use the CLI. It is advised to follow and use the kxi tools to setup. The below command will setup the necessary secrets needed to install the chart.
kxi install setup
If not using the CLI, and have not already added the repo and secrets. They can be manually installed as follows
Add the KX Helm repo
helm repo add --username <username> --password <password> kx-insights https://nexus.dl.kx.com/repository/kx-insights-charts
Setup the image pull secret
An image pull secret is required in order to pull images from a private Docker registry. Using your credentials for the kdb Insights Nexus registry, you can create a secret for pulling these images.
kubectl create secret docker-registry kxi-nexus-pull-secret \
--docker-username=<username> \
--docker-password=<password> \
--docker-server=registry.dl.kx.com
Create values file
global:
imagePullSecrets:
- name: kxi-nexus-pull-secret
replicaCount: 1
resources:
requests:
cpu: 8
memory: 64Gi
Installing the chart
helm
allows the user to view available versions of a chart with the command
helm search repo kx-insights/kxi-overprovisioning --versions
The chart can then be installed with the command below and using the values.yaml
with the provided values above.
helm install kxi-overprovisioning kx-insights/kxi-overprovisioning --version=<version> -f values.yaml