Problems / Kubernetes and containers, medium

Six minutes without a node

Three pods run on three nodes, each limited to 1 vCPU and busy most of the time. At 30 s one node dies; Kubernetes replaces its pod only after 50 s plus the 5-minute toleration.

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Your goals

Keep success at 92% or more and p99 under 1 s over the run. (Some requests are always lost in the 50 s before Kubernetes notices a node is gone.)

Test cases

Like a coding problem, a solution has to pass every case, not just the one it was built for. Submit in the lab runs all 3; 1 of them are hidden until then.

  1. As given. The problem’s own traffic, scheduled failures and seed.
  2. A slow dependency. The main data store or model answers twice as slowly for part of the run.

The traffic

60 requests a second for 300 seconds: 100% api (reads).

The system

What each component does in this design, and what calls it. The simulator mimics each one from these settings.

ComponentIts job hereSettings
Load balancerLoad balancerTraffic enters here.Calls API (pods).Layer 4 balancers route by IP and port; layer 7 balancers read HTTP and can route by path or header.–
API (pods)Container platformLoad balancer forwards to it.Calls Postgres.Kubernetes places pods on nodes by their CPU and memory requests, and only replaces a lost node's pods after about 5 minutes.20 slots
PostgresSQL databaseAPI (pods) calls it.Postgres runs one process per connection, which is why poolers like PgBouncer sit in front of busy databases.32 vCPU · 300 connections

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