I have been looking into Docker containerization for a while now but few things are still confusing to me. I understand that all the containers are grouped into a cluster and cluster management tools like Docker Swarm, DC/OS, Kubernetes or Rancher can be used to manage docker containers. I have been testing out Container cluster management with DC/OS and Kubernetes, but still a few questions remain unanswered to me.
How does auto scaling in container level help us in production servers? How does the application serve traffic from multiple containers?
Suppose we have deployed a web application using containers and they have auto scaled. How does the traffic flow to the containers? How are the sessions managed?
What metrics are calculated for autoscaling containers?
The autoscaling in DC/OS (note: Mesosphere is the company, DC/OS the open source project) the autoscaling is described in detail in the docs. Essentially the same as with Kubernetes, you can use either low-level metrics such as CPU utilization to decide when to increase the number of instances of an app or higher-level stuff like app throughput, for example using the Microscaling approach.
Regarding your question how the routing works (how are requests forwarded to an instance, that is a single container running): you need a load balancer and again, DC/OS provides you with this out of the box. And again, the options are detailed out in the docs, essentially: HAProxy-based North-South or IPtables-based, East-West (cluster internal) load balancers.
Kubernetes has concept called service. A Kubernetes Service is an abstraction which defines a logical set of Pods and a policy by which to access them. Kubernetes uses services to serve traffic from multiple containers. You can read more about services here.
AFAIK, Sessions are managed outside kubernetes, but Client-IP based session affinity can be selected by setting service.spec.sessionAffinity to "ClientIP". You can read more about Service and session affinity here
Multiple metrics like cpu and memory can be used for autoscaling containers. There is a good blog you can read about autoscaling, when and how.
Related
I'm very new to the infrastructure so I built a simple monolith application and I use docker for building a container and deploy it on my linux server. My question is, do I need to install kubernetes for a single container and if no how can I scale or do the load balancing.
"... do I need to install kubernetes for a single container" - No, it is not mandatory. One can use docker to manage applications. Kubernetes is a platform that can be used to orchestrate containerized applications. It offers tools and concepts like autoscaling based on load, isolation through namespaces, network access management through services and ingresses, and much more. But Kubernetes is not the only platform for orchestration. There are others, for example OpenShift, docker swarm, rancher. All those are optional platforms with additional tooling and concepts that can be used if necessary.
"how can I scale or do the load balancing." - We can, for example, define the replicas through the replicas variable in a docker-compose file. All containers defined under a service are accessed through this service's name. How exactly the balancing is done can also be configured through the endpoint_mode configuration. If we need even more control, we can deploy a separate load balancer, e.g. nginx. A possible configuration is described in this medium article.
For future posts, please limit yourself to one question per post.
Im new to docker and am wanting to accomplish something but I am unsure on how to Orchestrate my docker containers to do this.
What I want to do:
I have an API that in simple does a calculation from a requested file. It loads the file (around 80mb) from disk to memory then keep it in memory for 2 hours (caching).
Im wanting to have an architecture where for example when the container gets overwhelmed with requests a new one fires up, and when the original container frees its memory and the requests slow down then the container shuts down.
Is Memory and CPU Container Orchestration possible?
Thank You,
/Jeremy
Docker itself is not dedicated to the orchestration multiple containers. You need to use some container orchestration environment. The most popular are Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and Apache Mesos. Or if you want to run in the Cloud, then some vendor-specific, like AWS ECS.
Here's a good list of container clustering toolkit.
In all these environments it's possible to configure what you described. If you're completely new to the topic, then I recommend installing Docker-for-Desktop which comes with built-in Kubernetes and play with that in your local.
For sure, container orchestration system is what you want to be able efficiently manage your docker containers.
You can find current complete list of solutions for production environment in this spreadsheet
Tools, like kubernetes will give you reach set of benefits eg
Provisioning and deployment of containers
Redundancy and availability of containers
Scaling up or removing containers to spread application load evenly
across host infrastructure
Allocation of resources between containers
Load balancing of service discovery between containers
Health monitoring of containers and hosts
In Kubernetes there is a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, that
automatically scales the number of pods in a replication controller,
deployment, replica set or stateful set based on observed CPU
utilization (or, with custom metrics support, on some other
application-provided metrics). Note that Horizontal Pod Autoscaling
does not apply to objects that can’t be scaled, for example,
DaemonSets.
As for beginning I would recommend you start with minikube.
More advanced ways are setup manually cluster using kubeadm either look into the cloud providers
Please be aware that you will not have option to modify cloud based control plane. More info in my related answer
I’m trying to figure out and learn the patterns and best practices on moving a bunch of Docker containers I have for an application into Kubernetes. Things like, pod design, services, deployments, etc. For example, I could create a Pod with the single web and application containers in them, but that’d not be a good design.
Searching for things like architecture and design with Kubernetes just seems to yield topics on the product’s architecture or how to implement a Kubernetes cluster, and not the overlay of designing the pods, services, etc.
What does the community generally refer to this application later design in the Kubernetes world, and can anyone refer me to a 101 on this topic please?
Thanks.
Kubernetes is a complex system, and learning step by step is the best way to gain expertise. What I recommend you is documentation about Kubernetes, from where you can learn about each of components.
Another good option is to review 70 best K8S tutorials, which are categorized in many ways.
Designing and running applications with scalability, portability, and robustness in mind can be challenging. Here are great resources about it:
Architecting applications for Kubernetes
Using Kubernetes in production, lessons learned
Kubernetes Design Principles from Google
Well, there's no Kubernetes approach but rather a Cloud Native one: I would suggest you Designing Distributed Systems: patterns and paradigms by Brendan Burns.
It's really good because it provides several scenarios along with pattern approached and related code.
Most of the examples are obviously based on Kubernetes but I think that the implementation is not so important, since you have to understand why and when to use an Ambassador pattern or a FaaS according to the application needs.
The answer to this can be quite complex and that's why it is important that software/platform architects understand K8s well.
Mostly you will find an answer on that which tells you "put each application component in a single pod". And basically that's correct as the main reason for K8s is high availability, fault tolerance of the infrastructure and things like this. This leads us to, if you put every single component to a single pod and make it with a replica higher than 2 its will reach a batter availability.
But you also need to know why you want to go to K8s. At the moment it is a trending topic. But if you don't want to Ops a cluster and actually don't need HA or so, why you don't run on stuff like AWS ECS, Digital Ocean droplets and co?
Best answers you will currently find are all around how to design and cut microservices as each microservice could be represented in a pod. Also, a good starting point is from RedHat Principles of container-based Application Design
or InfoQ.
Un kubernetes cluster is composed of:
A master server called control plane
Nodes: nodes which execute the applications / Containers or pods
By design, a production kubernetes cluster must have at least a master server and 2 nodes according to the kubernetes documentation.
Here is a summary of the components of a kubernetes cluster:
Master = control plane:
kube-api-server: expose the kubernetes api
etcd: key values store for the cluster
kube-scheduler: distributed the pods on the nodes
kube-controller-manager: controller of nodes, pods, cluster components.
Nodes = Servers that run applications
Kubelet: runs on each node, It makes sure that the containers are running in a pod.
kube-proxy: Allows the pods to communicate in the cluster and outside
Runtine container: allows to run the containers / pods
Complementary modules = addons
DNS: DNS server that serves DNS records for Kubernetes services.
Webui: Graphical dashboard for the cluster
Container Resource Monitoring: Records metrics on containers in a central DB, provides UI to browse them
Cluster-level Logging: Records container logs in a central log with a search / browse interface.
I'm using docker on a bare metal server. I'm pretty happy with docker-compose to configure and setup applications.
Still some features are missing, like configuration management and monitoring maybe there are other solutions to solve this issues but I'm a bit overwhelmed by the feature set of Kubernetes and can't judge if it would help me here.
I'm also open for recommendations to solve the requirements separately:
Configuration / Secret management
Monitoring of my docker hostes applications (e.g. having some kind of dashboard)
Remot container control (SSH is okay with only one Server)
Being ready to scale my environment (based on multiple different Dockerized applications) to more than one server in future - already thinking about networking/service discovery issues with a pure docker-compose setup
I'm sure Kubernetes covers some of these features, but I have the feeling that it's too much focused on Cloud platforms where Machines are created on the fly (since I only have at most few bare metal Servers)
I hope the questions scope is not too broad, else please use the comment section and help me to narrow down the question.
Thanks.
I think the Kubernetes is absolutely much your requests and it is what you need.
Let's start one by one.
I have the feeling that it's too much focused on Cloud platforms where Machines are created on the fly (since I only have at most few bare metal Servers)
No, it is not focused on Clouds. Kubernates can be installed almost on any bare-metal platform (include ARM) and have many tools and instructions which can help you to do it. Also, it is easy to deploy it on your local PC using Minikube, which will prepare local cluster for you within VMs or right in your OS (only for Linux).
Configuration / Secret management
Kubernates has a powerful configuration and management based on special objects which can be attached to your containers. You can read more about configuration management in that article.
Moreover, some tools like Helm can provide you more automation and range of preconfigured applications, which you can install using a single command. And you can prepare your own charts for it.
Monitoring of my docker hostes applications (e.g. having some kind of dashboard)
Kubernetes has its own dashboard where you can get many kinds of information: current applications status, configuration, statistics and many more. Also, Kubernetes has great integration with Heapster which can be used with Grafana for powerful visualization of almost anything.
Remot container control (SSH is okay with only one Server)
Kubernetes controlling tool kubectl can get logs and connect to containers in the cluster without any problems. As an example, to connect a container "myapp" you just need to call kubectl exec -it myapp sh, and you will get sh session in the container. Also, you can connect to any application inside your cluster using kubectl proxy command, which will forward a port you need to your PC.
Being ready to scale my environment (based on multiple different Dockerized applications) to more than one server in future - already thinking about networking/service discovery issues with a pure docker-compose setup
Kubernetes can be scaled up to thousands of nodes. Or can have only one. It is your choice. Independent of a cluster size, you will get production-grade networking, service discovery and load balancing.
So, do not afraid, just try to use it locally with Minikube. It will make many of operation tasks more simple, not more complex.
I am using elastic beanstalk to deploy the web services as Docker containers on AWS using ECS. Default load balancer available in EBS provides me network-level autoscaling to handle the load on EC2 instance.
How to handle auto-scaling in application level and use dockerization features using ECS like Kubernetes handling the dockers? I want to scale my individual dockers when it receives more memory or CPU usage. Please help me to achieve this.
You can have the ECS cluster managed by an auto scaling group . This would take care of the hardware underlying the docker images.
As far as the containers themselves are concerned, you can go the way of application auto scaling.
Since both these services can be configured to answer to CW alarms for both downscale and upscale, you can have a HIGH cpu/ram alarm policy to add 1 host and 2 container replicas for example and remove the same amount on a LOW alarm.
Hope this helps
You can use scaling of task when you are updating your service which is attached with a cloudwatch alarm to scale up/down and called as service autoscaling.
Ref: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/service-auto-scaling.html
These are not the answers to this question. Using multicontainer docker environment on ELB service, we can specify (within the Dockerrun.aws.json) our docker services and their relationships, but we cannot specify the number of instances for individual services. This means that if we want to scale our ELB docker services, we can do that useing autoscale groups and CloudWatch alarms, but this means that our entire docker service environment will be affected: if we have 3 docker services, we can scale only all them together, not individual services.
The only think you can do is to use Elastic Container Service (ecs). Within this service you will create the cluster (similar to Kubernetes approach), then create individual services which will be able to run multiple tasks, and each task will be the specification for individual docker container. This way you will be able to run your services in desired way and scale them appropriately.