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Tools for Resource Utilization Improvement

Terakhir diperbarui:2023-02-09 10:29:13

    Background

    Public clouds are leased instead of purchased services with complete technical support and assurance, greatly contributing to business stability, scalability, and convenience. But more work needs to be done to reduce costs and improve efficiency, for example, adapting to application development, architecture design, management and Ops, and reasonable use in the cloud. According to the Kubernetes Standards for Cost Reduction and Efficiency Enhancement | Analysis of Containerized Computing Resource Utilization Rate, resource utilization is improved after IDC cloud migration, but not that much; the average utilization of containerized resources is only 13%, indicating a long and uphill way towards improvement.

    This article details:

    1. The reason for low CPU and memory utilization in Kubernetes clusters
    2. TKE productized methods for easily improving resource utilization

    Resource Waste Scenarios

    To figure out why utilization is low, let's look at a few cases of resource use:

    Scenarios 1: Over 50% of reserved resources are wasted

    The Request field in Kubernetes manages the CPU and memory reservation mechanism, which reserves certain resources in one container from being used by another. For more information, see Resource Management for Pods and Containers. If Request is set to a small value, resources may fail to accommodate the business, especially when the load becomes high. Therefore, users tend to set Request to a very high value to ensure the service reliability. However, the business load is not that high most of the time. Taking CPU as an example, the following figure shows the relationship between the resource reservation (request) and actual usage (cpu_usage) of a container in a real-world business scenario:

    As you can see, resource reservation is way more than the actual usage, and the excessive part cannot be used by other loads. Obviously, setting Request to a very high value leads to great waste. In response, you need to set a proper value and limit infinite business requests as needed, so that resources will not be occupied overly by certain businesses. You can refer to ResourceQuota and LimitRange discussed later. In addition, TKE will launch a smart request recommendation product to help you narrow the gap between Request and Usage, effectively improving resource utilization while guaranteeing business stability.

    Scenario 2: Business resource utilization sees an obvious change pattern, and resource waste is serious during off-peak hours, which usually last longer than peak hours

    Most businesses see an obvious change pattern in resource utilization. For example, a bus system usually has a high load during the day and a low load at night, and a game often starts to experience a traffic surge on Friday night, which drops on Sunday night.

    As you can see, the same business requests different amounts of resources during different time periods. If Request is set to a fixed value, utilization will be low when the load is low. The solution is to dynamically adjust the number of replicas to sustain different loads. For more information, see HPA, HPC, and CA discussed later.

    Scenario 3: Resource utilization differs greatly by business type

    Online businesses usually have a high load during the day and require a low latency, so they must be scheduled and run first. In contrast, offline businesses generally have low requirements for the operating time period and latency and can run during off-peak hours of online business loads. In addition, some businesses are computing-intensive and consume a lot of CPU resources, while others are memory-intensive and consume a lot of memory resources.

    As shown above, online/offline hybrid deployment helps dynamically schedule offline and online businesses in different time periods to improve resource utilization. For computing-intensive and memory-intensive businesses, affinity scheduling can be used to find the right node. For detailed directions, see online/offline hybrid deployment and affinity scheduling discussed later.

    Improving Resource Utilization in Kubernetes

    TKE has productized a series of tools based on a large number of actual businesses, helping you easily and effectively improve resource utilization. There are two ways: 1. manual resource allocation and limitation based on Kubernetes native capabilities; 2. automatic solution based on business characteristics.

    1. Resource allocation and limitation

    Imagine that you are a cluster administrator and your cluster is shared by four business departments. You need to ensure business stability while allowing for on-demand use of resources. In order to improve the overall utilization, it is necessary to limit the upper threshold of resources used by each business and prevent excess usage using some default values.

    Ideally, Request and Limit values are set as needed. Here, Request is resource occupation, indicating the minimum amount of resources available for a container; Limit is resource limit, indicating the maximum amount of resources available for a container. This contributes to healthier container running and higher resource utilization, despite the fact that Request and Limit are often left unspecified. In the case of cluster sharing by teams/projects, Request and Limit tend to be set to high values to ensure stability. When you create a load in the TKE console, the following default values will be set for all containers, which are based on actual business analysis and estimation and may deviate from real-world requirements.

    Resource Request Limit
    CPU (core) 0.25 0.5
    Memory (MiB) 256 1,024

    To fine-tune your resource allocation and management, you can set namespace-level "resource quota" and "limit range" on TKE.

    If your cluster has four businesses, you can use the namespace and ResourceQuota to isolate them and limit resources.
    ResourceQuota is used to set a quota on resources in a namespace, which is an isolated partition in a Kubernetes cluster. A cluster usually contains multiple namespaces to house different businesses. You can set different ResourceQuota values for different namespaces to limit the cluster resource usage by a namespace, thus implementing preallocation and limitation. ResourceQuota applies to the following. For more information, see Resource Quotas.

    1. Computing resources: Sum of "request" and "limit" of CPU and memory for all containers
    2. Storage resources: Sum of storage requests of all PVCs.
    3. Number of objects: Total number of resource objects such as PVC/Service/Configmap/Deployment

    ResourceQuota use cases

    • Assign different namespaces to different projects/teams/businesses and set resource quotas for each namespace for allocation.
    • Set an upper limit on the amount of resources used by a namespace to improve cluster stability and prevent excessive preemption and consumption of resources by a single namespace.

    ResourceQuota in TKE

    TKE has productized ResourceQuota. You can directly use it in the console to limit the resource usage of a namespace. For detailed directions, see Namespace.

    2. Automatic improvement of resource utilization

    ResourceQuota and LimitRange for resource allocation and limitation respectively rely on experience and manual operations, mainly addressing unreasonable resource requests and allocation. This section describes how to improve resource utilization through automated dynamic adjustments from the perspectives of elastic scaling, scheduling, and online/offline hybrid deployment.

    2.1 Elastic scaling

    In the second resource waste scenario, if your business goes through peak and off-peak hours, a fixed resource "request" value is bound to cause resource waste during off-peak hours. In this case, you can consider automatically increasing and decreasing the number of replicas of the business load during peak and off-peak hours respectively to enhance the overall utilization.

    Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) can automatically increase and decrease the number of Pod replicas in Deployment and StatefulSet based on metrics such as CPU and memory utilization to stabilize workloads and achieve truly on-demand usage.

    HPA use cases

    1. Traffic bursts: if traffic becomes heavy suddenly, the number of Pods is automatically increased in time at overload.
    2. Automatic scaling in: if traffic is light, the number of Pods is automatically decreased to avoid waste at underload.

    HPA in TKE

    TKE supports many metrics for elastic scaling based on the custom metrics API, covering CPU, memory, disk, network, and GPU in most HPA scenarios. For more information on the list, see HPA Metrics. In complex scenarios such as automatic scaling based on the QPS per replica, the prometheus-adapter can be installed. For detailed directions, see Using Custom Metrics for Auto Scaling in TKE.

    2.2 Scheduling

    The Kubernetes scheduling mechanism is a native resource allocation mechanism which is efficient and graceful. Its core feature is to find the right node for each Pod. In TKE scenarios, the scheduling mechanism contributes to the transition from application-layer to resource-layer elastic scaling. A reasonable scheduling policy can be configured based on business characteristics by properly leveraging Kubernetes scheduling capabilities to effectively enhance resource utilization in clusters.

    If Kubernetes' scheduler accidentally scheduled a CPU-intensive business instance to a memory-intensive node, all the CPU of the node will be taken up, but its memory will be barely used, resulting in a serious waste of resources. In this case, you can flag such a node as a CPU-intensive node and flag a business load during creation to indicate that it is a CPU-intensive load. Kubernetes' scheduler will then schedule the load to a CPU-intensive node, a way of finding the most suitable node to effectively improve resource utilization.

    When creating Pods, you can set node affinity to specify nodes to which Pods will be scheduled (these nodes are specified with Kubernetes labels).

    Node affinity use cases

    Node affinity is ideal for scenarios where there are workloads with different resource requirements running simultaneously in a cluster. For example, Tencent Cloud's CVM nodes can be CPU-intensive or memory-intensive. If certain businesses require much higher CPU usage than memory usage, using common CVMs will inevitably cause a huge waste of memory. In this case, you can add a batch of CPU-intensive CVMs to the cluster and schedule CPU-consuming Pods to these CVMs, so as to improve the overall utilization. Similarly, you can manage heterogeneous nodes (such as GPUs) in the cluster, specify the amount of GPU resources needed in the workloads, and have the scheduling mechanism find the right nodes to run these workloads.

    Node affinity in TKE

    TKE provides an identical method to use node affinity as native Kubernetes. You can use this feature in the console or by configuring a YAML file. For detailed directions, see Proper Resource Allocation.

    2.3 Online/Offline hybrid business deployment

    If you have both online web businesses and offline computing businesses, you can use TKE's online/offline hybrid deployment technology to dynamically schedule and run businesses to improve resource utilization.

    In the traditional architecture, big data and online businesses are independent and deployed in different resource clusters. Generally, big data businesses are for offline computing and experience peak hours during nights, during which online businesses are barely loaded. Leveraging complete isolation capabilities of containers (involving CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network I/O) and strong orchestration and scheduling capabilities of Kubernetes, cloud-native technologies implement the hybrid deployment of online and offline businesses to fully utilize resources during idle hours of online businesses.

    Use cases of online/offline hybrid deployment

    In the Hadoop architecture, offline and online jobs are in different clusters. Online and streaming jobs experience obvious load fluctuations, which means a lot of resources will be idle during off-peak hours, leading to great waste and higher costs. In clusters with online/offline hybrid deployment, offline tasks are dynamically scheduled to online clusters during off-peak hours, significantly improving resource utilization. Currently, Hadoop YARN can only statically allocate resources based on the static resource status reported by NodeManager, making it unable to well support hybrid deployment.

    Online/Offline hybrid deployment in TKE

    Online businesses experience obvious and regular load fluctuations, with a low resource utilization at night. In this case, the big data management platform delivers resource creation requests to Kubernetes clusters to increase the computing power of the big data application. For more information, see here.

    How to Balance Resource Utilization and Stability

    Besides costs, system stability is another metric that weighs heavily in enterprise Ops. It's challenging to balance the two. On the one hand, the higher the resource utilization, the better for cost reduction; on the other hand, a too high resource utilization may cause overload and thereby OOM errors or CPU jitters.
    To help enterprises get rid of the dilemma, TKE provides the DeScheduler to keep the cluster load under control. It is responsible for protecting nodes with risky loads and gracefully draining businesses from them. The relationship between the DeScheduler and the Dynamic Scheduler is as shown below:

    DeScheduler in TKE

    You can install and use the DeScheduler in an extended add-on. For detailed directions, see DeScheduler.

    For more information on the DeScheduler guide, see here.

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