Have kube jobs start on waiting pods - kubernetes

I am working on a scenario where I want to be able to maintain some X number of pods in waiting (and managed by kube) and then upon user request (via some external system) have a kube job start on one of those waiting pods. So now the waiting pods count is X-1 and kube starts another pod to bring this number back to X.
This way I'll be able to cut down on the time taken to create a pod, start a container and getting is ready to start actual processing. The processing data can be sent to those pods via some sort of messaging (akka or rabbitmq).
I think the ReplicationControllers are best place to keep idle pods, but when I create a job how can I specify that I want to be able to use one of the pods that are in waiting and are managed by ReplicationController.

I think I got this to work upto a state on top of which I can build this solution.
So what I am doing is starting a RC with replicas: X (X is the number of idle pods I wish to maintain, usually not a very large number). The pods that it starts have custom label status: idle or something like that. The RC spec.selector has the same custom label value to match with the pods that it manages, so spec.selector.status: idle. When creating this RC, kube ensures that it creates X pods with their status=idle. Somewhat like below:
apiVersion: v1
kind: ReplicationController
metadata:
name: testrc
spec:
replicas: 3
selector:
status: idle
template:
metadata:
name: idlepod
labels:
status: idle
spec:
containers:
...
On the other hand I have a job yaml that has spec.manualSelector: true (and yes I have taken into account that the label set has to be unique). With manualSelector enabled, I can now define selectors on the job like below.
apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
generateName: testjob-
spec:
manualSelector: true
selector:
matchLabels:
status: active
...
So clearly, RC creates pods with status=idle and job expects to use pods with status=active because of the selector.
So now whenever I have a request to start a new job, I'll update label on one of the pods managed by RC so that its status=active. The selector on RC will effect the release of this pod from its control and start another one because of replicas: X set on it. And the released pod is no longer controller by RC and is now orphan. Finally, when I create a job, the selector on this job template will match the label of the orphaned pod and this pod will then be controlled by the new job. I'll send messages to this pod that will start the actual processing and finally bring it to complete.
P.S.: Pardon my formatting. I am new here.

Related

Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA) with an initContainer that requires a Job

I have a specific scenario where I'd like to have a deployment controlled by horizontal pod autoscaling. To handle database migrations in pods when pushing a new deployment, I followed this excellent tutorial by Andrew Lock here.
In short, you must define an initContainer that waits for a Kubernetes Job to complete a process (like running db migrations) before the new pods can run.
This works well, however, I'm not sure how to handle HPA after the initial deployment because if the system detects the need to add another Pod in my node, the initContainer defined in my deployment requires a Job to be deployed and run, but since Jobs are one-off processes, the pod can not initialize and run properly (a ttlSecondsAfterFinished attribute removes the Job anyways).
How can I define an initContainer to run when I deploy my app so I can push my database migrations in a Job, but also allow HPA to control dynamically adding a Pod without needing an initContainer?
Here's what my deployment looks like:
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: graphql-deployment
spec:
replicas: 1
selector:
matchLabels:
app: graphql-pod
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: graphql-pod
spec:
initContainers:
- name: wait-for-graphql-migration-job
image: groundnuty/k8s-wait-for:v1.4 # This is an image that waits for a process to complete
args:
- job
- graphql-migration-job # this job is defined next
containers:
- name: graphql-container
image: image(graphql):tag(graphql)
The following Job is also deployed
apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
name: graphql-migration-job
spec:
ttlSecondsAfterFinished: 30
template:
spec:
containers:
- name: graphql-migration-container
image: image(graphql):tag(graphql)
command: ["npm", "run", "migrate:reset"]
restartPolicy: Never
So basically what happens is:
I deploy these two resources to my node
Job is initialized
initContainer on Pod waits for Job to complete using an image called groundnuty/k8s-wait-for:v1.4
Job completes
initContainer completes
Pod initializes
(after 30 TTL seconds) Job is removed from node
(LOTS OF TRAFFIC)
HPA realizes a need for another pod
initContainer for NEW pod is started, but cant run because Job doesn't exist
...crashLoopBackOff
Would love any insight on the proper way to handle this scenario!
There is, unfortunately, no simple Kubernetes feature to resolve your issue.
I recommend extending your deployment tooling/scripts to separate the migration job and your deployment. During the deploy process, you first execute the migration job and then deploy your deployment. Without the job attached, the HPA can nicely scale your pods.
There is a multitude of ways to achieve this:
Have a bash, etc. script first to execute the job, wait and then update your deployment
Leverage more complex deployment tooling like Helm, which allows you to add a 'pre-install hook' to your job to execute them when you deploy your application

Exactly one Pod

I'm working on deploying the Thanos monitoring system and one of its components, the metric compactor, warns that there should never be more than one compactor running at the same time. If this constraint is violated it will likely lead to corruption of metric data.
Is there any way to codify "Exactly One" pod via Deployment/StatefulSet/etc, aside from "just set replicas: 1 and never scale"? We're using Rancher as an orchestration layer and it's real easy to hit that + button without thinking about it.
Limit the replicas in your deployment to 1
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: my-app
spec:
replicas: 1
Be careful with Deployment, because they can be configured with two update strategy:
RollingUpdate: new pods are added while and old pods are terminated. This mean that, depending on the maxSurge option, if you set your replicas to 1, you may still be have at most 2 pods.
Recreate: all the previous pods are terminated before any new pods are created.
Instead, Statefulsets guarantee that there will never be more than 1 instance of a pod at any given time.
apiVersion: apps/v1beta1
kind: StatefulSet
spec:
replicas: 1
Unlike Deployments, pods are not replaced until the previous has been terminated.

Is there a way to downscale pods only when message is processed (the pod finished its task) with the HorizontalPodAutoscaler in Kubernetes?

I'v setup Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler with custom metrics using the prometheus adapter https://github.com/DirectXMan12/k8s-prometheus-adapter. Prometheus is monitoring rabbitmq, and Im watching the rabbitmq_queue_messages metric. The messages from the queue are picked up by the pods, that then do some processing, which can last for several hours.
The scale-up and scale-down is working based on the number of messages in the queue.
The problem:
When a pod finishes the processing and acks the message, that will lower the num. of messages in the queue, and that would trigger the Autoscaler terminate a pod. If I have multipe pods doing the processing and one of them finishes, if Im not mistaking, Kubernetes could terminate a pod that is still doing the processing of its own message. This wouldnt be desirable as all the processing that the pod is doing would be lost.
Is there a way to overcome this, or another way how this could be acheveed?
here is the Autoscaler configuration:
kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
apiVersion: autoscaling/v2beta1
metadata:
name: sample-app-rabbitmq
namespace: monitoring
spec:
scaleTargetRef:
# you created above
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
name: sample-app
minReplicas: 1
maxReplicas: 10
metrics:
- type: Object
object:
target:
kind: Service
name: rabbitmq-cluster
metricName: rabbitmq_queue_messages_ready
targetValue: 5
You could consider approach using preStop hook.
As per documentation Container States, Define postStart and preStop handlers:
Before a container enters into Terminated, preStop hook (if any) is executed.
So you can use in your deployment:
lifecycle:
preStop:
exec:
command: ["your script"]
### update:
I would like to provide more information due to some research:
There is an interesting project:
KEDA allows for fine grained autoscaling (including to/from zero) for event driven Kubernetes workloads. KEDA serves as a Kubernetes Metrics Server and allows users to define autoscaling rules using a dedicated Kubernetes custom resource definition.
KEDA can run on both the cloud and the edge, integrates natively with Kubernetes components such as the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, and has no external dependencies.
For the main question "Kubernetes could terminate a pod that is still doing the processing of its own message".
As per documentation:
"Deployment is a higher-level concept that manages ReplicaSets and provides declarative updates to Pods along with a lot of other useful features"
Deployment is backed by Replicaset. As per this controller code there exist function "getPodsToDelete". In combination with "filteredPods" it gives the result: "This ensures that we delete pods in the earlier stages whenever possible."
So as proof of concept:
You can create deployment with init container. Init container should check if there is a message in the queue and exit when at least one message appears. This will allow main container to start, take and process that message. In this case we will have two kinds of pods - those which process the message and consume CPU and those who are in the starting state, idle and waiting for the next message. In this case starting containers will be deleted at the first place when HPA decide to decrease number of replicas in the deployment.
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
labels:
app: complete
name: complete
spec:
replicas: 5
revisionHistoryLimit: 10
selector:
matchLabels:
app: complete
template:
metadata:
creationTimestamp: null
labels:
app: complete
spec:
hostname: c1
containers:
- name: complete
command:
- "bash"
args:
- "-c"
- "wa=$(shuf -i 15-30 -n 1)&& echo $wa && sleep $wa"
image: ubuntu
imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
resources: {}
initContainers:
- name: wait-for
image: ubuntu
command: ['bash', '-c', 'sleep 30']
dnsPolicy: ClusterFirst
restartPolicy: Always
terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 30
Hope this help.
Horizontal Pod Autoscaler is not designed for long-running tasks, and will not be a good fit. If you need to spawn one long-running processing tasks per message, I'd take one of these two approaches:
Use a task queue such as Celery. It is designed to solve your exact problem: have a queue of tasks that needs to be distributed to workers, and ensure that the tasks run to completion. Kubernetes even provides an official example of this setup.
If you don't want to introduce another component such as Celery, you can spawn a Kubernetes job for every incoming message by yourself. Kubernetes will make sure that the job runs to completion at least once - reschedule the pod if it dies, etc. In this case you will need to write a script that reads RabbitMQ messages and creates jobs for them by yourself.
In both cases, make sure you also have Cluster Autoscaler enabled so that new nodes get automatically provisioned if your current nodes are not sufficient to handle the load.

How to create deployments with more than one pod?

I'm hosting an application on the Google Cloud Platform via Kubernetes, and I've managed to set up this continuous deployment pipeline:
Application code is updated
New Docker image is automatically generated
K8s Deployment is automatically updated to use the new image
This works great, except for one issue - the deployment always seems to have only one pod. Because of this, when the next update cycle comes around, the entire application goes down, which is unacceptable.
I've tried modifying the YAML of the deployment to increase the number of replicas, and it works... until the next image update, where it gets reset back to one pod again.
This is the command I use to update the image deployment:
set image deployment foo-server gcp-cd-foo-server-sha256=gcr.io/project-name/gcp-cd-foo-server:$REVISION_ID
You can use this command if you dont want to edit deployment yaml file:
kubectl scale deployment foo-server --replicas=2
Also, look at update strategy with maxUnavailable and maxsurge properties.
In your orgional deployment.yml file keep the replicas to 2 or more, othervise you cant avoid down time if only one pod is running and you are going to re-deploy/upgrade etc.
Deployment with 3 replicas( example):
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: nginx-deployment
labels:
app: nginx
spec:
replicas: 3
selector:
matchLabels:
app: nginx
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: nginx
spec:
containers:
- name: nginx
image: nginx:1.7.9
ports:
- containerPort: 80
Deployment can ensure that only a certain number of Pods may be down
while they are being updated. By default, it ensures that at least 25%
less than the desired number of Pods are up (25% max unavailable).
Deployment can also ensure that only a certain number of Pods may be
created above the desired number of Pods. By default, it ensures that
at most 25% more than the desired number of Pods are up (25% max
surge).
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/deployment/
Nevermind, I had just set up my deployments wrong - had something to do with using the GCP user interface to create the deployments rather than console commands. I created the deployments with kubectl run app --image ... instead and it works now.

Make Kubernetes wait for Pod termination before removing from Service endpoints

According to Termination of Pods, step 7 occurs simultaneously with 3. Is there any way I can prevent this from happening and have 7 occur only after the Pod's graceful termination (or expiration of the grace period)?
The reason why I need this is that my Pod's termination routine requires my-service-X.my-namespace.svc.cluster.local to resolve to the Pod's IP during the whole process, but the corresponding Endpoint gets removed as soon as I run kubectl delete on the Pod / Deployment.
Note: In case it helps making this clear, I'm running a bunch of clustered VerneMQ (Erlang) nodes which, on termination, dump their contents to other nodes on the cluster — hence the need for the nodenames to resolve correctly during the whole termination process. Only then should the corresponding Endpoints be removed.
Unfortunately kubernetes was designed to remove the Pod from the endpoints at the same time as the prestop hook is started (see link in question to kubernetes docs):
At the same time as the kubelet is starting graceful shutdown, the
control plane removes that shutting-down Pod from Endpoints
This google kubernetes docs says it even more clearly:
Pod is set to the “Terminating” State and removed from the
endpoints list of all Services
There also was also a feature request for that. which was not recognized.
Solution for helm users
But if you are using helm, you can use hooks (e.g. pre-delete,pre-upgrade,pre-rollback). Unfortunately this helm hook is an extra pod which can not access all pod resources.
This is an example for a hook:
apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
name: graceful-shutdown-hook
annotations:
"helm.sh/hook": pre-delete,pre-upgrade,pre-rollback
labels:
app.kubernetes.io/name: graceful-shutdown-hook
spec:
template:
spec:
containers:
- name: graceful-shutdown
image: busybox:1.28.2
command: ['sh', '-cx', '/bin/sleep 15']
restartPolicy: Never
backoffLimit: 0
Maybe you should consider using headless service instead of using ClusterIP one. That way your apps will discover using the actual endpoint IPs and the removal from endpoint list will not break the availability during shutdown, but will remove from discovery (or from ie. ingress controller backends in nginx contrib)