Kubernetes as an Availability Manager for Microservice Applications

TL;DR

This paper evaluates Kubernetes' effectiveness in ensuring high availability for microservice applications across different architectures and configurations, comparing its performance with established frameworks.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of Kubernetes' availability management capabilities, including experiments with various architectures, configurations, and a comparison with the Availability Management Framework.

Findings

Kubernetes' default configuration can lead to significant service outages.

Adding redundancy improves availability but does not eliminate outages.

Kubernetes' healing capabilities vary depending on architecture and configuration.

Abstract

The move towards the microservice based architecture is well underway. In this architectural style, small and loosely coupled modules are developed, deployed, and scaled independently to compose cloud-native applications. However, for carrier-grade service providers to migrate to the microservices architectural style, availability remains a concern. Kubernetes is an open source platform that defines a set of building blocks which collectively provide mechanisms for deploying, maintaining, scaling, and healing containerized microservices. Thus, Kubernetes hides the complexity of microservice orchestration while managing their availability. In a preliminary work we evaluated Kubernetes, using its default configuration, from the availability perspective in a private cloud settings. In this paper, we investigate more architectures and conduct more experiments to evaluate the availability that Kubernetes delivers for its managed microservices. We present different architectures for public and private clouds. We evaluate the availability achievable through the healing capability of Kubernetes. We investigate the impact of adding redundancy on the availability of microservice based applications. We conduct experiments under the default configuration of Kubernetes as well as under its most responsive one. We also perform a comparative evaluation with the Availability Management Framework (AMF), which is a proven solution as a middleware service for managing high-availability. The results of our investigations show that in certain cases, the service outage for applications managed with Kubernetes is significantly high.