Chapter 21. Overcommitting

Containers can specify compute resource requests and limits. Requests are used for scheduling your container and provide a minimum service guarantee. Limits constrain the amount of compute resource that may be consumed on your node.

The scheduler attempts to optimize the compute resource use across all nodes in your cluster. It places pods onto specific nodes, taking the pods' compute resource requests and nodes' available capacity into consideration.

Requests and limits enable administrators to allow and manage the overcommitment of resources on a node, which may be desirable in development environments where a tradeoff of guaranteed performance for capacity is acceptable.

For each compute resource, a container may specify a resource request and limit. Scheduling decisions are made based on the request to ensure that a node has enough capacity available to meet the requested value. If a container specifies limits, but omits requests, the requests are defaulted to the limits. A container is not able to exceed the specified limit on the node.

The enforcement of limits is dependent upon the compute resource type. If a container makes no request or limit, the container is scheduled to a node with no resource guarantees. In practice, the container is able to consume as much of the specified resource as is available with the lowest local priority. In low resource situations, containers that specify no resource requests are given the lowest quality of service.

The node-enforced behavior for compute resources is specific to the resource type.

A node is overcommitted when it has a pod scheduled that makes no request, or when the sum of limits across all pods on that node exceeds available machine capacity.

In an overcommitted environment, it is possible that the pods on the node will attempt to use more compute resource than is available at any given point in time. When this occurs, the node must give priority to one pod over another. The facility used to make this decision is referred to as a Quality of Service (QoS) Class.

For each compute resource, a container is divided into one of three QoS classes with decreasing order of priority:

Memory is an incompressible resource, so in low memory situations, containers that have the lowest priority are killed first:

Scheduling is based on resources requested, while quota and hard limits refer to resource limits, which can be set higher than requested resources. The difference between request and limit determines the level of overcommit; for instance, if a container is given a memory request of 1Gi and a memory limit of 2Gi, it is scheduled based on the 1Gi request being available on the node, but could use up to 2Gi; so it is 200% overcommitted.

If OpenShift Container Platform administrators would like to control the level of overcommit and manage container density on nodes, masters can be configured to override the ratio between request and limit set on developer containers. In conjunction with a per-project LimitRange specifying limits and defaults, this adjusts the container limit and request to achieve the desired level of overcommit.

This requires configuring the ClusterResourceOverride admission controller in the master-config.yaml as in the following example (reuse the existing configuration tree if it exists, or introduce absent elements as needed):

  admissionConfig:
    pluginConfig:
      ClusterResourceOverride:   1
        configuration:
          apiVersion: v1
          kind: ClusterResourceOverrideConfig
          memoryRequestToLimitPercent: 25  2
          cpuRequestToLimitPercent: 25     3
          limitCPUToMemoryPercent: 200     4

After changing the master configuration, a master restart is required.

Note that these overrides have no effect if no limits have been set on containers. Create a LimitRange object with default limits (per individual project, or in the project template) in order to ensure that the overrides apply.

Note also that after overrides, the container limits and requests must still be validated by any LimitRange objects in the project. It is possible, for example, for developers to specify a limit close to the minimum limit, and have the request then be overridden below the minimum limit, causing the pod to be forbidden. This unfortunate user experience should be addressed with future work, but for now, configure this capability and LimitRanges with caution.

When configured, overrides can be disabled per-project (for example, to allow infrastructure components to be configured independently of overrides) by editing the project and adding the following annotation:

quota.openshift.io/cluster-resource-override-enabled: "false"

In an overcommitted environment, it is important to properly configure your node to provide best system behavior.

kubeletArguments:
  cpu-cfs-quota:
    - "false"

$ sysctl -w vm.overcommit_memory=1

$ sysctl -w vm.panic_on_oom=0

$ swapoff -a