In this Episode Rahul and Vipul discuss about the various strategies
they are using to implement application scaling on kubernetes.
Rahul talks about how they deployed HPA for memory based autoscaling.
Also talks about Custom metrics autoscaling and how they scale on Query per second(QPS).
Further he explains how the ingress controller implementation helped them
in configuring path based routing.

Key Points From This Episode

• Rahul’s experience at DevOpsDays CapeTown 2017.


• Autoscaling applications using HPA.


• Custom metrics autoscaling.


• How ingress controller can be used to use path based routing.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

• DevOpsDays CapeTown


• BigBinary on Twitter


• Rahul on Twitter


• Vipul on Twitter


• Kubernetes


• Ingress Controller

Transcript

[0:00:04 ] Vipul: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode for “All Things DevOps!” Today I have Rahul with me and we will be continuing our discussion on Kubernetes with regards to auto-scaling as well as some of the things that Rahul is working on for getting the most out of how we can do auto-scaling. Before we begin welcome Rahul and I think you’ve been just DevOpsDays do you want to give a recap of how that went?

[0:00:38 ] Rahul: Sure. Hi Vipul, it’s nice one more time on this new episode of “All Things DevOps.” So, yeah, a couple of weeks before I went to DevOps Cape Town to talk about deploying production-ready Kubernetes clusters. It was a two-day conference and I enjoyed. My talk went well and I had a lot of questions about how to use Kubernetes in production. Some people are trying to use Kubernetes and what issues they are facing on. Some enterprise companies trying to move all of their architecture to containerized world mostly on kubernetes and what challenges they are facing.

So after my talk, I met some of the people who came up with their questions like, how do they simplify the deployment pipeline using tools like Jenkins? What are the things they are trying to minimize their build time using base images? So, a couple of attendees approached me about minimizing their build image time. For one of the users, they were deploying similar rails kind of setup on kubernetes. They were migrating from traditional server architecture to containerized architecture and developing their apps with minikube and deploying them on Kubernetes clusters.

So over there we just found that some of the docker image commands or some in the docker file, the docker image was not segregated or isolated. All of the things were in single docker file that used to take their deployment time a little more and that also used to build one single big image and they had to reuse it on each deployment. So, I answered some of this kind of questions and there was one attendee who asked me about like, “how do I make sure that my Kubernetes software which I am deploying on my own data-center or on bare metal or on-premise with my complete set of hardware or data center?”

So I suggested him like, “Kubernetes is open-source software and you can anytime build up your own cluster using tools like kops, kubeadm, kubespray, tectonic or some of your simple bash scripts.” So he looked like a HIPAA compliant, HIPAA compliant client and he wanted to deploy his software with all of the standards mentioned by them. So he was little curious about from where the Kubernetes setup images, so when we deploy a multi-master Kubernetes cluster we have multiple master nodes and to start up a cluster there are some necessary images from where Kubernetes automatically fetches it.

If you are creating a cluster using kops, kops will automatically by default get the hyperkube image which is a collection of all the necessary components of Kubernetes, Kubernetes etcd, Kubernetes Control Manager, kube-scheduler and all. So it’s more concern about like from where the registry images are coming if those are coming from Google container registry from how I can specify their… like I don’t want it from the specific vendor, I want it from my own. So I pointed it to him that you can do it by using this flag but by default, those come from Google container registry.

So these kinds of discussions were really great to have. Then apart from DevOps and Kubernetes, one thing I liked about this conference was there were some open sessions. The few random topics were selected by organizers based on the suggestions from attendees and the topics were like the monolithic app. There was also one of the open spaces regarding remote work culture and one other with DevSecOps like DevOps security and operations.

So I attended all the workspaces in the different rooms and I got really interesting questions when I was attending remote working open-spaces. Some… we being, we being big binary working completely remote, I sketched our work-flow and some of the people were really interested in how to adapt to the remote life.

[0:05:32 ] Vipul: So, how about some of the other talks like, any interesting talks that you talk to or hear? I think you mentioned something about storage or something interesting?

[0:05:48 ] Rahul: Yep, so conference had almost all kind of talks. The keynote was from Ken Morgage and it was really… the topic itself says like “You can’t buy DevOps,” so that went… the talk was really good and he depicted the work-flow and how the deployment process right from the times of mainframes to today’s era like, containers or server-less. How it changed and how we should… kind of how we work closely with teams like dev… Earlier it was sys admins and DevOps and now like, site reliability engineers and all. So the keynote was… keynote from… I think it was from Ken Murgage, “You can’t buy by DevOps.” That was one of the most enjoyed talks, but we first started with the CAP theorem and then there was one talk from Jack Oberlin about continuous testing and the final frontier of DevOps. So most of the talks were mainly focused on automation so there.

[0:07:00 ] Vipul: Right, right.

[0:07:02 ] Vipul: Yeah, the other talk from De Wet Blomerus is what I learned from applying for 107 jobs. That was one of the interesting talk and apart from technical talks…

[0:07:13 ] Vipul: 107 jobs?

[0:07:15 ] Rahul: Yeah, so he was like, I mean he was an experienced guy worked for few years and then he just depicted like what I learned from applying at 107 jobs and how finally he decided to choose GitLab because it was a remote work and he found like, that is it now and I will go for this job. So that was a nice talk. It was not that technical but that was nice and after that, another one talked from Spencer Krun, a speaker from IBM. He talked about like what can we learn from eSports?

So showing the sports theme, he showed like how we can handle the best practices in DevOps and all. So after that, we had open-spaces. So there were only three talks on that day. The day started with three talks and followed by open-spaces, so then we had some workshops. There was a workshop on Azure from Sheriff El Mahdi and there was a workshop on Ansible from the guy from Linux Professional Institute. So it was a full packed schedule for two days and one of the talks about the state of upspin.io from storm Joubert who is like this, I mean Storm Joubert talked about security for everyone and he focused about some security concerns and what may just we should take on.

Then we had a Minikube talk like, how to start development using Minikube and Whiteny Tennant describe like how to use Minikube in your development pipeline. So yeah, this was really a fun conference and after that at the end Sheriff El Mahadi and then..again took a workshop upon like OSS based DevOps on Azure. So after the workshop he really showed us like, how Azure is working towards open-source software and how they are coming up with new technologies like Azure container instances and all. Yeah, this was all about conference and…

[0:09:46 ] Vipul: Quite interesting, how did you find community in and around South Africa.

[0:09:57 ] Rahul: Yeah. So this was my first time to South Africa and I haven’t been really in touch with some of the communities like, most of the open-source communities that they start from Europe or USA or from other countries but about South Africa I was really curious and I think the community is good at least in Cape Town. There are continuous meet-ups happening around almost and everything so I was there for DevOps Days Cape Town, but they have their monthly meetup Cape Town, DevOps Days meetup, also they have other conference called “ScaleConf” which is, ScaleConf which is in the month of February or March which is mostly focused on scaling of applications and infrastructure. By my observation almost like, I think most of that attendees were like if I’m not wrong they were mostly working on technologies like .Net, Java, Ruby on Rails and at least I would say like 10-15% people were trying to use container technologies in production while 30-40% people were trying to get into containers and adapt containers in their workflow and other people being involving other DevOps automation were also present over there. So I would say a community is good and there is their own discussion, I mean there is one independent slack where all the people gather in South Africa.

[0:11:49 ] Vipul: Nice. So