Horizontal scaling means that we scale by adding more machines into the pool of resources. Still, there is a choice of how much power (CPU, RAM) each node in the cluster will have.
When cluster managed with Kubernetes it is extremely easy to set any CPU and memory limit for Pods. How to choose the optimal CPU and memory size for cluster nodes (or Pods in Kubernetes)?
For example, there are 3 nodes in a cluster with 1 vCPU and 1GB RAM each. To handle more load there are 2 options:
Add the 4th node with 1 vCPU and 1GB RAM
Add to each of the 3 nodes more power (e.g. 2 vCPU and 2GB RAM)
A straightforward solution is to calculate the throughput and cost of each option and choose the cheaper one. Are there any more advanced approaches for choosing the compute resources of the nodes in a cluster with horizontal scalability?
For this particular example I would go for 2x vCPU instead of another 1vCPU node, but that is mainly cause I believe running OS for anything serious on a single vCPU is just wrong. System to behave decently needs 2+ cores available, otherwise it's too easy to overwhelm that one vCPU and send the node into dust. There is no ideal algorithm for this though. It will depend on your budget, on characteristics of your workloads etc.
As a rule of thumb, don't stick to too small instances as you have a bunch of stuff that has to run on them always, regardless of their size and the more node, the more overhead. 3x 4vCpu+16/32GB RAM sounds like nice plan for starters, but again... it depends on what you want, need and can afford.
The answer is related to such performance metrics as latency and throughput:
Latency is a time interval between sending request and receiving response.
Throughput is a request processing rate (requests per second).
Latency has influence on throughput: bigger latency = less throughput.
If a business transaction consists of multiple sequential calls of the services that can't be parallelized, then compute resources (CPU and memory) has to be chosen based on the desired latency value. Adding more instances of the services (horizontal scaling) will not have any positive influence on the latency in this case.
Adding more instances of the service increases throughput allowing to process more requests in parallel (if there are no bottlenecks).
In other words, allocate CPU and memory resources so that service has desired response time and add more service instances (scale horizontally) to handle more requests in parallel.
Related
I’d like to autoscale the pods not based on the average memory, but rather based on largest amount of available memory in a given pod.
Example:
Let’s say the target maximum available memory is 50%.
If we have 7 pods already and 6 of them have 90% occupied memory, but a single pod with 40% occupied memory, that’d satisfy my criteria and we won’t need to upscale. But the moment that last pod goes below 50% available memory we’ll upscale.
I know it’s not a wise criteria for scaling in case majority of case, but in my particular circumstance, it fits.
I have a k8s cluster in GKE with node autoscaler turned on. I want to maximize the resource utilization, and have applied all the suggestion on requests/limit changes recommended by GKE. At this moment there is 4 nodes as shown in the image below. They all uses n2-standard-2 i.e. 4 GB of memory per vCPU.
Memory request to allocatable ration is quite high compared to CPU request/allocatable.
Wondering if any other machine machine type that better suits my case. or any other resource optimization recommendation?
In GKE You can select custom compute sizes.
We find most workloads work best in 1:4 vCPU to Memory ratio (Hence the default). But it's possible to support other workload types. For your workload it looks like 1:2 for vCPU to Memory would be appropriate.
Also, it's hard to know exactly what sort of resource limit to set. You should look into generating some load for your cluster and using VPA to get a suggestion made by GKE cluster to be able to right size the limits.
I have two machine to do the load test. One machine has worse CPU performance. And the machine will reach high CPU usage when number of users keep increasing, while the other machine still has low CPU usage. Locust complains:
[2022-07-28 11:22:15,529] PF1YW96X-MUO/WARNING/root: CPU usage above 90%! This may constrain your throughput and may even give inconsistent response time measurements! See https://docs.locust.io/en/stable/running-locust-distributed.html for how to distribute the load over multiple CPU cores or machines
[2022-07-28 11:25:06,766] PF1YW96X-MUO/WARNING/locust.runners: CPU usage was too high at some point during the test! See https://docs.locust.io/en/stable/running-distributed.html for how to distribute the load over multiple CPU cores or machines
I want to set lower weight for the machine who has worse CPU perfomance. Is there a way to do that?
You can run fewer worker processes on the weak machine. If necessary you could run more than one process per core on the strong machine, just to make it take more Users.
I have a service deployed in Kubernetes and I am trying to optimize the requested cpu resources.
For now, I have deployed 10 instances and set spec.containers[].resources.limits.cpu to 0.1, based on the "average" use. However, it became obvious that this average is rather useless in practice because under constant load, the load increases significantly (to 0.3-0.4 as far as I can tell).
What happens consequently, when multiple instances are deployed on the same node, is that this node is heavily overloaded; pods are no longer responsive, are killed and restarted etc.
What is the best practice to find a good value? My current best guess is to increase the requested cpu to 0.3 or 0.4; I'm looking at Grafana visualizations and see that the pods on the heavily loaded node(s) converge there under continuous load.
However, how can I know if they would use more load if they could before becoming unresponsive as the node is overloaded?
I'm actually trying to understand how to approach this in general. I would expect an "ideal" service (presuming it is CPU-focused) to use close to 0.0 when there is no load, and close to 1.0 when requests are constantly coming in. With that assumption, should I set the cpu.requests to 1.0, taking a perspective where actual constant usage is assumed?
I have read some Kubernetes best practice guides, but none of them seem to address how to set the actual value for cpu requests in practice in more depth than "find an average".
Basically come up with a number that is your lower acceptable bound for how much the process runs. Setting a request of 100m means that you are okay with a lower limit of your process running 0.1 seconds for every 1 second of wall time (roughly). Normally that should be some kind of average utilization, usually something like a P99 or P95 value over several days or weeks. Personally I usually look at a chart of P99, P80, and P50 (median) over 30 days and use that to decide on a value.
Limits are a different beast, they are setting your CPU timeslice quota. This subsystem in Linux has some persistent bugs so unless you've specifically vetted your kernel as correct, I don't recommend using it for anything but the most hostile of programs.
In a nutshell: Main goal is to understand how much traffic a pod can handle and how much resource it consumes to do so.
CPU limits are hard to understand and can be harmful, you might want
to avoid them, see static policy documentation and relevant
github issue.
To dimension your CPU requests you will want to understand first how much a pod can consume during high load. In order to do this you can :
disable all kind of autoscaling (HPA, vertical pod autoscaler, ...)
set the number of replicas to one
lift the CPU limits
request the highest amount of CPU you can on a node (3.2 usually on 4cpu nodes)
send as much traffic as you can on the application (you can achieve simple Load Tests scenarios with locust for example)
You will eventually end up with a ratio clients-or-requests-per-sec/cpu-consumed. You can suppose the relation is linear (this might not be true if your workload complexity is O(n^2) with n the number of clients connected, but this is not the nominal case).
You can then choose the pod resource requests based on the ratio you measured. For example if you consume 1.2 cpu for 1000 requests per second you know that you can give each pod 1 cpu and it will handle up to 800 requests per second.
Once you know how much a pod can consume under its maximal load, you can start setting up cpu-based autoscaling, 70% is a good first target that can be refined if you encounter issues like latency or pods not autoscaling fast enough. This will avoid your nodes to run out of cpu if the load increases.
There are a few gotchas, for example single-threaded applications are not able to consume more than a cpu. Thus if you give it 1.5 cpu it will run out of cpu but you won't be able to visualize it from metrics as you'll believe it still can consume 0.5 cpu.
I have a databricks cluster setup with auto scale upto 12 nodes.
I have often observed databricks scaling cluster from 6 to 8, then 8 to 11 and then 11 to 14 nodes.
So my queries -
1. Why is it picking up 2-3 nodes to be added at one go
2. Why auto scale is triggered as I see not many jobs are active or heavy processing on cluster. CPU usage is pretty low.
3. While auto scaling why is it leaving notebook in waiting state
4. Why is it taking up to 8-10 min to auto scale
Thanks
I am trying to investigate why data bricks is auto scaling cluster when its not needed
When you create a cluster, you can either provide a fixed number of workers for the cluster or provide a minimum and maximum number of workers for the cluster.
When you provide a fixed size cluster, Databricks ensures that your cluster has the specified number of workers. When you provide a range for the number of workers, Databricks chooses the appropriate number of workers required to run your job. This is referred to as autoscaling.
With autoscaling, Databricks dynamically reallocates workers to account for the characteristics of your job. Certain parts of your pipeline may be more computationally demanding than others, and Databricks automatically adds additional workers during these phases of your job (and removes them when they’re no longer needed).
Autoscaling makes it easier to achieve high cluster utilization, because you don’t need to provision the cluster to match a workload. This applies especially to workloads whose requirements change over time (like exploring a dataset during the course of a day), but it can also apply to a one-time shorter workload whose provisioning requirements are unknown. Autoscaling thus offers two advantages:
Workloads can run faster compared to a constant-sized
under-provisioned cluster.
Autoscaling clusters can reduce overall costs compared to a
statically-sized cluster.
Databricks offers two types of cluster node autoscaling: standard and optimized.
How autoscaling behaves
Autoscaling behaves differently depending on whether it is optimized or standard and whether applied to an interactive or a job cluster.
Optimized
Scales up from min to max in 2 steps.
Can scale down even if the cluster is not idle by looking at shuffle
file state.
Scales down based on a percentage of current nodes.
On job clusters, scales down if the cluster is underutilized over
the last 40 seconds.
On interactive clusters, scales down if the cluster is underutilized
over the last 150 seconds.
Standard
Starts with adding 4 nodes. Thereafter, scales up exponentially, but
can take many steps to reach the max.
Scales down only when the cluster is completely idle and it has been
underutilized for the last 10 minutes.
Scales down exponentially, starting with 1 node.