Node Size Matters - Running K8s as Cheaply as Possible - Alex Meijer & Michael Dresser, Stackwatch

Node Size Matters - Running K8s as Cheaply as Possible - Alex Meijer & Michael Dresser, Stackwatch

What if you discovered that your Kubernetes cluster had less than half of its nodes available for you to run your workloads… that would be an emergency, right? Depending on how you select the nodes in your cluster, you could be in such a situation today - without even knowing it! The cause is one of the biggest “hidden” costs of using Kubernetes: system overhead. Overhead is the portion of every node that is designated unusable and is reserved for Kubernetes to provide its services to you. While overhead cannot be entirely eliminated, Alex and Michael will present their work exploring how to minimize this performance-robbing property of Kubernetes. They will present a study of overheads across the major providers’ node families, demo new overhead measurement features available in Opencost (a CNCF Sandbox project), and provide an analysis of the results. This talk will also include a brief overview of actionable recommendations and novel methodologies for sizing Kubernetes clusters.