Is it worth using SSD as boot disk? I'm not planning to access local disks within pods.
Also, GCP by default creates 100GB disk. If I use 20GB disk, will it cripple the cluster or it's OK to use smaller sized disks?
Why one or the other?. Kubernetes (Google Conainer Engine) is mainly Memory and CPU intensive unless your applications need a huge throughput on the hard drives. If you want to save money you can create tags on the nodes with HDD and use the node-affinity to tweak which pods goes where so you can have few nodes with SSD and target them with the affinity tags.
I would always recommend SSD considering the small difference in price and large difference in performance. Even if it just speeds up the deployment/upgrade of containers.
Reducing the disk size to what is required for running your PODs should save you more. I cannot give a general recommendation for disk size since it depends on the OS you are using and how many PODs you will end up on each node as well as how big each POD is going to be. To give an example: When I run coreOS based images with staging deployments for nginx, php and some application servers I can reduce the disk size to 10gb with ample free room (both for master and worker nodes). On the extreme side - If I run self-contained golang application containers without storage need, each POD will only require a few MB space.
Related
context
Our current context is the following: researchers are running HPC calculations on our Kubernetes cluster. Unfortunately, some pods cannot get scheduled because the container engine (here Docker) is not able to pull the images because the node is running out of disk space.
hypotheses
images too big
The first hypothesis is that the images are too big. This probably the case because we know that some images are bigger than 7 GB.
datasets being decompressed locally
Our second hypothesis is that some people are downloading their datasets locally (e.g. curl ...) and inflate them locally. This would generate the behavior we are observing.
Envisioned solution
I believe that this problem is a good case for a daemon set that would have access to the node's file system. Typically, this pod would calculate the total disk space used by all the pods on the node and would expose them as a Prometheus metric. From there is would be easy to set alert rules in place to check which pods have grown a lot over a short period of time.
How to calculate the total disk space used by a pod?
The question then becomes: is there a way to calculate the total disk space used by a pod?
Does anyone have any experience with this?
Kubernetes does not track overall storage available. It only knows things about emptyDir volumes and the filesystem backing those.
For calculating total disk space you can use below command
kubectl describe nodes
From the above output of the command you can grep ephemeral-storage which is the virtual disk size; this partition is also shared and consumed by Pods via emptyDir volumes, image layers,container logs and container writable layers.
Check where the process is still running and holding file descriptors and/or perhaps some space (You may have other processes and other file descriptors too not being released). Check Is that kubelet.
You can verify by running $ ps -Af | grep xxxx
With Prometheus you can calculate with the below formula
sum(node_filesystem_size_bytes)
Please go through Get total and free disk space using Prometheus for more information.
We are running 4 different micro-services on 4 different ec2 autoscaling groups:
service-1 - vcpu:4, RAM:32 GB, VM count:8
service-2 - vcpu:4, RAM:32 GB, VM count:8
service-3 - vcpu:4, RAM:32 GB, VM count:8
service-4 - vcpu:4, RAM:32 GB, VM count:16
We are planning to migrate this workload on EKS (in containers)
We need help in deciding the right node configuration (in EKS) to start with.
We can start with a small machine vcpu:4, RAM:32 GB, but will not get any cost saving as each container will need a separate vm.
We can use a large machine vcpu:16, RAM: 128 GB, but when these machines scale out, scaled out machine will be large and thus can be underutiliized.
Or we can go with a Medium machine like vcpu: 8, RAM:64 GB.
Other than this recommendation, we were also evaluating the cost saving of moving to containers.
As per our understanding, every VM machine comes with following overhead
Overhead of running hypervisor/virtualisation
Overhead of running separate Operating system
Note: One large VM vs many small VMs cost the same on public cloud as cost is based on number of vCPUs + RAM.
Hypervisor/virtualization cost is only valid if we are running on-prem, so no need to consider this.
On the 2nd point, how much resources a typical linux machine can take to run a OS? If we provision a small machine (vcpu:2, RAM:4GB), an approximate cpu usage is 0.2% and memory consumption (other than user space is 500Mb).
So, running large instances (count:5 instances in comparison to small instances count:40) can save 35 times of this cpu and RAM, which does not seem significant.
You are unlikely to see any cost savings in resources when you move to containers in EKS from applications running directly on VM's.
A Linux Container is just an isolated Linux process with specified resource limits, it is no different from a normal process when it comes to resource consumption. EKS still uses virtual machines to provide compute to the cluster, so you will still be running processes on a VM, regardless of containerization or not and from a resource point of view it will be equal. (See this answer for a more detailed comparison of VM's and containers)
When you add Kubernetes to the mix you are actually adding more overhead compared to running directly on VM's. The Kubernetes control plane runs on a set of dedicated VM's. In EKS those are fully managed in a PaaS, but Amazon charges a small hourly fee for each cluster.
In addition to the dedicated control plane nodes, each worker node in the cluster need a set of programs (system pods) to function properly (kube-proxy, kubelet etc.) and you may also define containers that must run on each node (daemon sets), like log collectors and security agents.
When it comes to sizing the nodes you need to find a balance between scaling and cost optimization.
The larger the worker node is the smaller the relative overhead of system pods and daemon sets become. In theory a worker node large enough to accommodate all your containers would maximize resources consumed by your applications compared to supporting applications on the node.
The smaller the worker nodes are the smaller the horizontal scaling steps can be, which is likely to reduce waste when scaling. It also provides better resilience as a node failure will impact fewer containers.
I tend to prefer nodes that are small so that scaling can be handled efficiently. They should be slightly larger than what is required from the largest containers, so that system pods and daemon sets also can fit.
We're planning to migrate our software to run in kubernetes with auto scalling, this is our current infrastructure:
PHP and apache are running in Google Compute Engine n1-standard-4 (4 vCPUs, 15 GB memory)
MySql is running in Google Cloud SQL
Data files (csv, pdf) and the code are storing in a single SSD Persistent Disk
I found many posts that recomments to store the data file in the Google Cloud Storage and use the API to fetch the file and uploading to the bucket. We have very limited time so I decide to use NFS to share the data files over the pods, the problem is nfs speed is slow, it's around 100mb/s when I copying the file with pv, the result from iperf is 1.96 Gbits/sec.Do you know how to achieve the same result without implement the cloud storage? or increase the NFS speed?
Data files (csv, pdf) and the code are storing in a single SSD Persistent Disk
There's nothing stopping you from volume mounting an SSD into the Pod so you can continue to use an SSD. I can only speak to AWS terminology, but some EC2 instances come with "local" SSD hardware, and thus you would only need to use a nodeSelector to ensure your Pods were scheduled onto machines that had said local storage available.
Where you're going to run into problems is if you are currently just using one php+apache and thus just one SSD, but now you want to scale the application up and it requires that all php+apache have access to the same SSD. That's a classic distributed application architecture problem, and something kubernetes itself can't fix for you.
If you're willing to expend the effort, you can also try any one of the other distributed filesystems (Ceph, GlusterFS, etc) and see if they perform better for your situation. Then again, "We have very limited time" I guess pretty much means that's off the table.
I am performance testing Ceph. I have a limited number of VMs to do this with. I want to have several radosgws, for a round-robin set up. Will my bechmarks be grossly inaccurate if I use the same hosts for OSDs and radosgw?
Main issue with sharing OSD with any other part of installation, is a thread count. Ceph OSD daemon creates a lot of threads during high load (you want to use Ceph under high load, aren't you?). I can't say how many threads radosgw creates, but it is a well known problem with scenario 'OSDs on compute hosts'. When you have too many threads, OS scheduler starts to mess up with them, threshing CPU cache and significantly drops performance (and raises latencies).
Ceph RGW is light weight process, does not require much CPU and Memory but it does require Network bandwidth. IMO you can collocate RGWs and OSDs provided that you have dedicated Ceph cluster and public networks and RGW should use Ceph public network.
I have done a similar kind of performance benchmarking which includes co-located and dedicated RGWs. I have not found significant performance difference between the two configurations. Co-located RGWs were performing a bit less ( but not substantial difference ).
So if one has to design a low cost object storage solution based on Ceph , then he might want to consider co-locating RGWs on OSDs. You can save some $$
FYI , co-located RGW configuration is not a supported configuration from RedHat point of view. Things are progressing preety fast in that direction.
I'm trying to setup a production mongo system on Amazon to use as a datastore for a realtime metrics system,
I initially used the MongoDB AMIs[1] in the Marketplace, but I'm confused in that there is only one data EBS. I've read that Mongo recommends RAID 10 on EBS storage (8 EBS on each server). Additionally, I've read that the bare minimum for production is a primary/secondary with an arbiter. Is RAID 10 still the recommended setup, or is one provisioned IOPS EBS sufficient?
Please Advise. We are a small shop, so what is the bare minimum we can get away with and still be reasonably safe?
[1] MongoDB 2.4 with 1000 IOPS - data: 200 GB # 1000 IOPS, journal: 25 GB # 250 IOPS, log: 10 GB # 100 IOPS
So, I just got off of a call with an Amazon System Engineer, and he had some interesting insights related to this question.
First off, if you are going to use RAID, he said to simply do striping, as the EBS blocks were mirrored behind the scenes anyway, so raid 10 seemed like overkill to him.
Standard EBS volumes tend to handle spiky traffic well (it may be able to handle 1K-2K iops for a few seconds), however eventually it will tail off to an average of 100 iops. One suggestion was to use many small EBS volumes and stripe them to get better iops throughput.
Some of his customers use just the ephemeral storage on the EC2 images, but then have multiple (3-5) nodes in the availability set. The ephemeral storage is the storage on the physical machine. Apparently, if you use the EC2 instance with the SSD storage, you can get up to 20K iops.
Some customers will do a huge EC2 image w/ssd for the master, then do a smaller EC2 w/ EBS for the secondary. The primary machine is performant, but the failover is available but has degraded performance.
make sure you check 'EBS Optimized' when you spin up an instance. That means you have a dedicated channel to the EBS storage (of any kind) instead of sharing the NIC.
Important! Provisioned IOPS EBS is expensive, and the bill does not shut off when you shut down the EC2 instances they are attached to. (this sucks while you are testing) His advice was to take a snapshot of the EBS volumes, then delete them. When you need them again, just create new provisioned IOPS EBS volumes, restore the snapshot, then reconfigure your EC2 instances to attache the new storage. (it's more work than it should be, but it's worth it not to get sucker punched with the IOPS bill.
I've got the same question. Both Amazon and Mongodb try to market a lot on provisioned IOPs chewing over its advantages over a standard EBS volume. We run prod instances on m2.4xlarge aws instances with 1 primary and 2 secondaries setup per service. In the highest utilized service cluster, apart from a few slow queries the monitoring charts do not reveal any drop on performance at all. Page faults are rare occurrences and that too between 0.0001 and 0.0004 faults once or twice a day. Background flushes are in milliseconds and locks and queues are so far at manageable levels. I/O waits on the Primary node at any time ranges between 0 to 2 %, mostly less than 1 and %idle steadily stays above 90% mark. Do I still need to consider provisioned IOPs given we've a budget still to improve any potential performance drag? Any guidance will be appreciated.