Kubernetes and Cluster Federation Control Plane Resilience

Long Term Design and Current Status

by Quinton Hoole, Mike Danese and Justin Santa-Barbara

December 14, 2015

Summary

Some amount of confusion exists around how we currently, and in future want to ensure resilience of the Kubernetes (and by implication Kubernetes Cluster Federation) control plane. This document is an attempt to capture that definitively. It covers areas including self-healing, high availability, bootstrapping and recovery. Most of the information in this document already exists in the form of github comments, PR's/proposals, scattered documents, and corridor conversations, so document is primarily a consolidation and clarification of existing ideas.

Terms

Self-healing: automatically restarting or replacing failed processes and machines without human intervention
High availability: continuing to be available and work correctly even if some components are down or uncontactable. This typically involves multiple replicas of critical services, and a reliable way to find available replicas. Note that it's possible (but not desirable) to have high availability properties (e.g. multiple replicas) in the absence of self-healing properties (e.g. if a replica fails, nothing replaces it). Fairly obviously, given enough time, such systems typically become unavailable (after enough replicas have failed).
Bootstrapping: creating an empty cluster from nothing
Recovery: recreating a non-empty cluster after perhaps catastrophic failure/unavailability/data corruption

Overall Goals

Resilience to single failures: Kubernetes clusters constrained to single availability zones should be resilient to individual machine and process failures by being both self-healing and highly available (within the context of such individual failures).
Ubiquitous resilience by default: The default cluster creation scripts for (at least) GCE, AWS and basic bare metal should adhere to the above (self-healing and high availability) by default (with options available to disable these features to reduce control plane resource requirements if so required). It is hoped that other cloud providers will also follow the above guidelines, but the above 3 are the primary canonical use cases.
Resilience to some correlated failures: Kubernetes clusters which span multiple availability zones in a region should by default be resilient to complete failure of one entire availability zone (by similarly providing self-healing and high availability in the default cluster creation scripts as above).
Default implementation shared across cloud providers: The differences between the default implementations of the above for GCE, AWS and basic bare metal should be minimized. This implies using shared libraries across these providers in the default scripts in preference to highly customized implementations per cloud provider. This is not to say that highly differentiated, customized per-cloud cluster creation processes (e.g. for GKE on GCE, or some hosted Kubernetes provider on AWS) are discouraged. But those fall squarely outside the basic cross-platform OSS Kubernetes distro.
Self-hosting: Where possible, Kubernetes's existing mechanisms for achieving system resilience (replication controllers, health checking, service load balancing etc) should be used in preference to building a separate set of mechanisms to achieve the same thing. This implies that self hosting (the kubernetes control plane on kubernetes) is strongly preferred, with the caveat below.
Recovery from catastrophic failure: The ability to quickly and reliably recover a cluster from catastrophic failure is critical, and should not be compromised by the above goal to self-host (i.e. it goes without saying that the cluster should be quickly and reliably recoverable, even if the cluster control plane is broken). This implies that such catastrophic failure scenarios should be carefully thought out, and the subject of regular continuous integration testing, and disaster recovery exercises.

Relative Priorities

(Possibly manual) recovery from catastrophic failures: having a Kubernetes cluster, and all applications running inside it, disappear forever perhaps is the worst possible failure mode. So it is critical that we be able to recover the applications running inside a cluster from such failures in some well-bounded time period.
1. In theory a cluster can be recovered by replaying all API calls that have ever been executed against it, in order, but most often that state has been lost, and/or is scattered across multiple client applications or groups. So in general it is probably infeasible.
2. In theory a cluster can also be recovered to some relatively recent non-corrupt backup/snapshot of the disk(s) backing the etcd cluster state. But we have no default consistent backup/snapshot, verification or restoration process. And we don't routinely test restoration, so even if we did routinely perform and verify backups, we have no hard evidence that we can in practise effectively recover from catastrophic cluster failure or data corruption by restoring from these backups. So there's more work to be done here.
Self-healing: Most major cloud providers provide the ability to easily and automatically replace failed virtual machines within a small number of minutes (e.g. GCE Auto-restart and Managed Instance Groups, AWS Auto-recovery and Auto scaling etc). This can fairly trivially be used to reduce control-plane down-time due to machine failure to a small number of minutes per failure (i.e. typically around "3 nines" availability), provided that:
1. cluster persistent state (i.e. etcd disks) is either:
  1. truely persistent (i.e. remote persistent disks), or
  2. reconstructible (e.g. using etcd dynamic member addition or backup and recovery).
2. and boot disks are either:
  1. truely persistent (i.e. remote persistent disks), or
  2. reconstructible (e.g. using boot-from-snapshot, boot-from-pre-configured-image or boot-from-auto-initializing image).
High Availability: This has the potential to increase availability above the approximately "3 nines" level provided by automated self-healing, but it's somewhat more complex, and requires additional resources (e.g. redundant API servers and etcd quorum members). In environments where cloud-assisted automatic self-healing might be infeasible (e.g. on-premise bare-metal deployments), it also gives cluster administrators more time to respond (e.g. replace/repair failed machines) without incurring system downtime.

Design and Status (as of December 2015)

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Control Plane Component	Resilience Plan	Current Status
API Server	Multiple stateless, self-hosted, self-healing API servers behind a HA load balancer, built out by the default "kube-up" automation on GCE, AWS and basic bare metal (BBM). Note that the single-host approach of having etcd listen only on localhost to ensure that only API server can connect to it will no longer work, so alternative security will be needed in the regard (either using firewall rules, SSL certs, or something else). All necessary flags are currently supported to enable SSL between API server and etcd (OpenShift runs like this out of the box), but this needs to be woven into the "kube-up" and related scripts. Detailed design of self-hosting and related bootstrapping and catastrophic failure recovery will be detailed in a separate design doc.	No scripted self-healing or HA on GCE, AWS or basic bare metal currently exists in the OSS distro. To be clear, "no self healing" means that even if multiple e.g. API servers are provisioned for HA purposes, if they fail, nothing replaces them, so eventually the system will fail. Self-healing and HA can be set up manually by following documented instructions, but this is not currently an automated process, and it is not tested as part of continuous integration. So it's probably safest to assume that it doesn't actually work in practise.
Controller manager and scheduler	Multiple self-hosted, self healing warm standby stateless controller managers and schedulers with leader election and automatic failover of API server clients, automatically installed by default "kube-up" automation.	As above.
etcd	Multiple (3-5) etcd quorum members behind a load balancer with session affinity (to prevent clients from being bounced from one to another). Regarding self-healing, if a node running etcd goes down, it is always necessary to do three things: allocate a new node (not necessary if running etcd as a pod, in which case specific measures are required to prevent user pods from interfering with system pods, for example using node selectors as described in dynamic member addition. In the case of remote persistent disk, the etcd state can be recovered by attaching the remote persistent disk to the replacement node, thus the state is recoverable even if all other replicas are down. There are also significant performance differences between local disks and remote persistent disks. For example, the sustained throughput local disks in GCE is approximatley 20x that of remote disks. Hence we suggest that self-healing be provided by remotely mounted persistent disks in non-performance critical, single-zone cloud deployments. For performance critical installations, faster local SSD's should be used, in which case remounting on node failure is not an option, so etcd runtime configuration should be used to replace the failed machine. Similarly, for cross-zone self-healing, cloud persistent disks are zonal, so automatic runtime configuration is required. Similarly, basic bare metal deployments cannot generally rely on remote persistent disks, so the same approach applies there.	Somewhat vague instructions exist on how to set some of this up manually in a self-hosted configuration. But automatic bootstrapping and self-healing is not described (and is not implemented for the non-PD cases). This all still needs to be automated and continuously tested.

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