This is not an easy question to answer without opining. I'll try. Kubernetes was designed to model Borg. This assumes a smaller number of larger clusters, shared across applications and users and environments. This design decision is visible in a number of places in the system - Namespaces, ip-per-pod, Services, PersistentVolumes. We really emphasized the idea that sharing is important, and the consumption of global resources (such as ports on a node) is rare and carefully guarded. The benefits of this are myriad: amortization of overhead, good HA properties, efficient bin-packing, higher utilization, and centralization of cluster administration, just to name a few.
What we see most often, though, is people using one cluster for one application (typically a number of Deployments, Services, etc. but one logical app). This means that any user of non-trivial size is going to have multiple clusters. This reduces the opportunities for efficiency and overhead amortization, and increases the administrative burden (and likely decreases the depth of understanding any one admin can reach). So, why? First, Kubernetes is, frankly, missing a few things that make the Borg model truly viable. Most clouds do not have sub-VM billing abilities. Container security is not well trusted yet (though getting better). Linux's isolation primitives are not perfect (Google has hundreds or thousands of patches) but they are catching up. The story around identity and policy and authorization and security are not where we want them to be. Second, it's still pretty early in the overall life of this system. Best practices are still being developed / discovered. Books are still being written. Third, the system is still evolving rapidly. People are not sure how things like multi-tenancy are going to look as they emerge. Siloing is a hedge against uncertainty. Fourth, upgrades-in-place are not as easy or robust as we want them to be. It's sometimes easier to just bring up a new cluster and flip the workload over. That is easier when the workload is more contained. All that said, I still believe the right eventual model is shared. I fully understand why people are not doing that yet, but I think that in a couple years time we will look back on this era as Kubernetes' awkward adolescence. Tim On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 4:38 PM, <terencek...@gmail.com> wrote: > First, I'm sorry if this question has already been asked & answered. My > search-foo may have failed me. > > We're in the process of moving to k8s and I'm not confident about how many > clusters I should setup. I know there are many possible options, but I'd > really appreciate feedback from people running k8s throughout their company. > > Nearly everything we run is containerized, and that includes our company-wide > internal services like FreeIPA, Gitlab, Jenkins, etc. We also have multiple, > completely separate, applications with varying security/auditing needs. > > Today, we schedule all of our containers via salt which only allows for > containers to be mapped to systems in a fixed way (not great). We have a > group of systems for each application environment and one group for internal > services. Each group of systems may be subject to different network > restrictions, depending on what they're running. > > The seemingly-obvious answer to replace our setup with k8s clusters is the > following configuration: > > - Create one cluster for internal services > - Create one cluster per application, with environments managed by namespaces > whenever possible > > Great, that puts us with several clusters, but a smaller number of clusters > than our previous "system groups". And, our network rules will mostly remain > as-is. > > However, there is another option. It seems that a mix of calico > ingress/egress rules, namespaces, RBAC, and carefully crafted pod resource > definitions would allow us to have a single large cluster. Maybe it's just my > inexperience, but that path seems daunting. > > So, all that background leads me to the simple question: In general, do you > create one cluster per application? If not, do you have some other general > rule that's not just "when latency or redudancy require it, make a new > cluster"? > > Thanks in advance! > Terence > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Kubernetes user discussion and Q&A" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to kubernetes-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to kubernetes-users@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/kubernetes-users. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Kubernetes user discussion and Q&A" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to kubernetes-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to kubernetes-users@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/kubernetes-users. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
