9.5. How to plan your environment according to application requirements

Consider an example application environment:

Extrapolated requirements: 550 CPU cores, 450GB RAM, and 1.4TB storage.

Instance size for nodes can be modulated up or down, depending on your preference. Nodes are often resource overcommitted. In this deployment scenario, you can choose to run additional smaller nodes or fewer larger nodes to provide the same amount of resources. Factors such as operational agility and cost-per-instance should be considered.

Some applications lend themselves well to overcommitted environments, and some do not. Most Java applications and applications that use huge pages are examples of applications that would not allow for overcommitment. That memory can not be used for other applications. In the example above, the environment would be roughly 30 percent overcommitted, a common ratio.

The application pods can access a service either by using environment variables or DNS. If using environment variables, for each active service the variables are injected by the kubelet when a pod is run on a node. A cluster-aware DNS server watches the Kubernetes API for new services and creates a set of DNS records for each one. If DNS is enabled throughout your cluster, then all pods should automatically be able to resolve services by their DNS name. Service discovery using DNS can be used in case you must go beyond 5000 services. When using environment variables for service discovery, the argument list exceeds the allowed length after 5000 services in a namespace, then the pods and deployments will start failing. Disable the service links in the deployment’s service specification file to overcome this:

 ---
    Kind: Template
    apiVersion: v1
    metadata:
      name: deploymentConfigTemplate
      creationTimestamp:
      annotations:
        description: This template will create a deploymentConfig with 1 replica, 4 env vars and a service.
        tags: ''
    objects:
    - kind: DeploymentConfig
      apiVersion: v1
      metadata:
        name: deploymentconfig${IDENTIFIER}
      spec:
        template:
          metadata:
            labels:
              name: replicationcontroller${IDENTIFIER}
          spec:
            enableServiceLinks: false
            containers:
            - name: pause${IDENTIFIER}
              image: "${IMAGE}"
              ports:
              - containerPort: 8080
                protocol: TCP
              env:
              - name: ENVVAR1_${IDENTIFIER}
                value: "${ENV_VALUE}"
              - name: ENVVAR2_${IDENTIFIER}
                value: "${ENV_VALUE}"
              - name: ENVVAR3_${IDENTIFIER}
                value: "${ENV_VALUE}"
              - name: ENVVAR4_${IDENTIFIER}
                value: "${ENV_VALUE}"
              resources: {}
              imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
              capabilities: {}
              securityContext:
                capabilities: {}
                privileged: false
            restartPolicy: Always
            serviceAccount: ''
        replicas: 1
        selector:
          name: replicationcontroller${IDENTIFIER}
        triggers:
        - type: ConfigChange
        strategy:
          type: Rolling
    - kind: Service
      apiVersion: v1
      metadata:
        name: service${IDENTIFIER}
      spec:
        selector:
          name: replicationcontroller${IDENTIFIER}
        ports:
        - name: serviceport${IDENTIFIER}
          protocol: TCP
          port: 80
          targetPort: 8080
        portalIP: ''
        type: ClusterIP
        sessionAffinity: None
      status:
        loadBalancer: {}
    parameters:
    - name: IDENTIFIER
      description: Number to append to the name of resources
      value: '1'
      required: true
    - name: IMAGE
      description: Image to use for deploymentConfig
      value: gcr.io/google-containers/pause-amd64:3.0
      required: false
    - name: ENV_VALUE
      description: Value to use for environment variables
      generate: expression
      from: "[A-Za-z0-9]{255}"
      required: false
    labels:
      template: deploymentConfigTemplate