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Rearchitecting Kubernetes for the Edge

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Jeffery, A 

Abstract

Recent years have seen Kubernetes emerge as a primary choice for container orchestration. Kubernetes largely targets the cloud environment but new use cases require performant, available and scalable orchestration at the edge. Kubernetes stores all cluster state in etcd, a strongly consistent key-value store. We find that at larger etcd cluster sizes, offering higher availability, write request latency significantly increases and throughput decreases similarly. Coupled with approximately 30% of Kubernetes requests being writes, this directly impacts the request latency and availability of Kubernetes, reducing its suitability for the edge. We revisit the requirement of strong consistency and propose an eventually consistent approach instead. This enables higher performance, availability and scalability whilst still supporting the broad needs of Kubernetes. This aims to make Kubernetes much more suitable for performance-critical, dynamically-scaled edge solutions.

Description

Keywords

edge, orchestration, Kubernetes, eventual consistency, CRDTs

Journal Title

EdgeSys 2021 - Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Edge Systems, Analytics and Networking, Part of EuroSys 2021

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0004-5411

Volume Title

Publisher

ACM
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/M02315X/1)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/R03351X/1)
EPSRC (via University of Nottingham) (Project 2454859)