Overprovisioning

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 required.

To reduce the time needed to wait for another node to be provisioned, you 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 kdb Insights 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.

Since the overprovisioning pods are marked with a lower priority, when the cluster reaches resource capacity, these would be evicted to free up space for any pending pods. If cluster autoscaling is enabled, this would cause the cluster to scale and the pod to be rescheduled for a new node.

KX Nexus

The KX Nexus repository will be sunsetted in the future. Nexus links on this page are provided as a temporary alternative to the KX Downloads Portal for existing users. The KX Downloads Portal is the preferred repository for all use cases and KX Nexus links will be removed once the KX Nexus repository is decommissioned.

Pod Priority

Pod Priority is a Kubernetes feature 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.

# Specifiy 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 each overprovisioning pod
resources.requests.memory	string		Requested memory for each overprovisioning pod

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, therefore the overprovisioning pods are requesting the majority resources.

replicaCount: 2
resources:
  requests:
    cpu: 8
    memory: 64Gi

Prerequisites

In order to run the chart you need access to the KX Downloads Portal repository, or the KX Nexus repository, and an associated image pull secret for your cluster. If you've already installed kdb Insights Enterprise, you can re-use the same secret.

Confirm the repo has been added

helm repo ls

The below command uses the KX Downloads Portal repository and is the preferred default:

NAME                    URL
kx-insights             https://portal.dl.kx.com/assets/helm/

Existing users can use the KX Nexus repository with the below command, until Nexus is removed in the future:

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-image-pull-secret                           kubernetes.io/dockerconfigjson        1      7d20h

Otherwise, the easiest way to setup the prerequisites is to use the kdb Insights CLI. The below command will setup the necessary secrets needed to install the chart.

kxi install setup

If you are using the CLI, and have not already added the repo and secrets, they can be manually installed as follows:

Add the KX Helm repo

The preferred default is to use the KX Downloads Portal with the following command:

helm repo add --username <username> --password <password> kx-insights https://portal.dl.kx.com/assets/helm/

Existing users can use the KX Nexus repository with the below command, until Nexus is removed in the future:

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 KX Downloads Portal or the KX Nexus, repository, you can create a secret for pulling these images.

kubectl create secret docker-registry kxi-image-pull-secret \
    --docker-username=<username> \
    --docker-password=<password> \
    --docker-server=portal.dl.kx.com

Existing users can use the KX Nexus repository with the below command, until Nexus is removed in the future:

kubectl create secret docker-registry kxi-image-pull-secret \
    --docker-username=<username> \
    --docker-password=<password> \
    --docker-server=registry.dl.kx.com

Create values file

global:
  imagePullSecrets:
    - name: kxi-image-pull-secret

replicaCount: 1
resources:
  requests:
    cpu: 8
    memory: 64Gi

Existing users can use the KX Nexus repository by replacing the name parameter in the above command with kxi-nexus-pull-secret, until Nexus is removed in the future.

Installing the chart

Using Helm, you can lookup the latest chart version:

helm search repo kx-insights/kxi-overprovisioning --versions

You can then install the chart with the command below, using the values.yaml from above:

helm install kxi-overprovisioning kx-insights/kxi-overprovisioning  --version=<version> -f values.yaml