daemonset with nodeSelectors - kubernetes

so i naturally run nvidia-docker and the k8s-device-plugin as a daemonset. as not all my kubernetes worker nodes have gpus, i use a nodeSelector in the daemonset to run just on nodes that i've labeled with accelerator=nvidia.
in another case, i also do the same for ingress-nginx: i label a few nodes that i want and run it as a daemonset. i then have an external (f5) load balancer that holds the VIP to the relevant DNS records for the ingress endpoints (yeah, i know there's a f5 ingress available - its on the todo list).
i've noticed that many users state that daemonsets should only be used for pods that should be running on ALL workers. is there anything inherently bad with my restriction of running daemonsets on a subset of nodes?

It's a valid use case. You can restrict the daemonset to run on the nodes that you want by using node selectors.

Related

Specify the Pods that a Node should run

In Kubernetes, is possible to specify, at the Node level, which deployments it should run? That's kind of different from Node/PodAffinity, since would be possible to create a new node with the specified set of deployments running from the beginning, instead of wait for the scheduler to place new pods on that Node.
This would look like templating a VM if you are using some managed Kubernetes service, where you can specify the # of instances and it will be new nodes on your cluster (that will come up with that set of workloads that you defined). Would be that possible or is not the right Kubernetes' mindset?
In Kubernetes it's always the scheduler that assigns Pods to nodes. You can't somehow manually launch Pods on a node (outside of Kubernetes) and at the same time let them be a part of the Kubernetes cluster. The way to go is to always define your deployment via the Kubernetes API server and then let the scheduler assign the Pods to the available nodes.
However, you can influence how the scheduler assigns Pods to nodes. In case you want to define at the node level which types of Pods can run on a specific node, you can use taints and tolerations: define taints on your nodes and tolerations on your Pods so that only a specific set of Pods can run on a given node.

Kubernetes StatefulSets - run pod on every worker node

What is the easiest way to run a single Pod on every available worker node as part of the StatefulSet. So, a one to one mapping.
Am I right to say every Pod will run on a different Node by default with a StatefulSet? In which case is it sufficient to add x pods to the SS where x Worker nodes exist in the cluster?
Thanks.
Use DaemonSet instead.
A DaemonSet ensures that all (or some) Nodes run a copy of a Pod. As nodes are added to the cluster, Pods are added to them. As nodes are removed from the cluster, those Pods are garbage collected. Deleting a DaemonSet will clean up the Pods it created.
If you really want to use statefulSet, you can take a look at features like nodeSelector or Affinity and Anti-affinity.

Difference between daemonsets and deployments

In Kelsey Hightower's Kubernetes Up and Running, he gives two commands :
kubectl get daemonSets --namespace=kube-system kube-proxy
and
kubectl get deployments --namespace=kube-system kube-dns
Why does one use daemonSets and the other deployments?
And what's the difference?
Kubernetes deployments manage stateless services running on your cluster (as opposed to for example StatefulSets which manage stateful services). Their purpose is to keep a set of identical pods running and upgrade them in a controlled way. For example, you define how many replicas(pods) of your app you want to run in the deployment definition and kubernetes will make that many replicas of your application spread over nodes. If you say 5 replica's over 3 nodes, then some nodes will have more than one replica of your app running.
DaemonSets manage groups of replicated Pods. However, DaemonSets attempt to adhere to a one-Pod-per-node model, either across the entire cluster or a subset of nodes. A Daemonset will not run more than one replica per node. Another advantage of using a Daemonset is that, if you add a node to the cluster, then the Daemonset will automatically spawn a pod on that node, which a deployment will not do.
DaemonSets are useful for deploying ongoing background tasks that you need to run on all or certain nodes, and which do not require user intervention. Examples of such tasks include storage daemons like ceph, log collection daemons like fluentd, and node monitoring daemons like collectd
Lets take the example you mentioned in your question: why iskube-dns a deployment andkube-proxy a daemonset?
The reason behind that is that kube-proxy is needed on every node in the cluster to run IP tables, so that every node can access every pod no matter on which node it resides. Hence, when we make kube-proxy a daemonset and another node is added to the cluster at a later time, kube-proxy is automatically spawned on that node.
Kube-dns responsibility is to discover a service IP using its name and only one replica of kube-dns is enough to resolve the service name to its IP. Hence we make kube-dns a deployment, because we don't need kube-dns on every node.

Pop to Pod communication for pods within the same Deployment

I have a Kubernetes deployment that has 3 replicas. It starts 3 pods which are distributed across a given cluster. I would like to know how to reliably get one pod to contact another pod within the same ReplicaSet.
The deployment above is already wrapped up in a Kubernetes Service. But Services do not cover my use case. I need each instance of my container (each Pod) to start-up a local in memory cache and have these cache communicate/sync with other cache instances running on other Pods. This is how I see a simple distributed cache working on for my service. Pod to pod communication within the same cluster is allowed as per the Kubernetes Network Model but I cannot see a reliable way to address each a pod from another pod.
I believe I can use a StatefulSet, however, I don't want to lose the ClusterIP assigned to the service which is required by Ingress for load balancing.
Ofcourse you can use statefulset, and ingress doesn't need ClusterIP that assigned to the service, since it uses the endpoints, so 'headless service' is ok.

What's the purpose of Kubernetes DaemonSet when replication controllers have node anti-affinity

DaemonSet is a Kubernetes beta resource that can ensure that exactly one pod is scheduled to a group of nodes. The group of nodes is all nodes by default, but can be limited to a subset using nodeSelector or the Alpha feature of node affinity/anti-affinity.
It seems that DaemonSet functionality can be achieved with replication controllers/replica sets with proper node affinity and anti-affinity.
Am I missing something? If that's correct should DaemonSet be deprecated before it even leaves Beta?
As you said, DaemonSet guarantees one pod per node for a subset of the nodes in the cluster. If you use ReplicaSet instead, you need to
use the node affinity/anti-affinity and/or node selector to control the set of nodes to run on (similar to how DaemonSet does it).
use inter-pod anti-affinity to spread the pods across the nodes.
make sure the number of pods > number of node in the set, so that every node has one pod scheduled.
However, ensuring (3) is a chore as the set of nodes can change over time. With DaemonSet, you don't have to worry about that, nor would you need to create extra, unschedulable pods. On top of that, DaemonSet does not rely on the scheduler to assign its pods, which makes it useful for cluster bootstrap (see How Daemon Pods are scheduled).
See the "Alternative to DaemonSet" section in the DaemonSet doc for more comparisons. DaemonSet is still the easiest way to run a per-node daemon without external tools.