We have a microservice at our workplace that handles Data Ingestion. That microservice also comes with a UI to configure and tune the Ingestion process. Eventually, we added a few features to the same UI such as a dashboard showing derived metrics from the data. We host this microservice in Kubernetes and expose it to the users through a GKE Ingress.
The Problem
Everything was working fine until we saw all pods under high load during bursts of incoming data. Our main data receiver services put the messages into RabbitMQ, which our microservice in question consumes. Our microservice is written in NodeJS and we do not have the luxury of multi-threading (we have Worker Threads, but we wanted to keep things simple). Thus, we saturate the CPU during the loads to keep things optimized, resulting in near 100% utilization.
There is a solution for this problem in k8s - Horizontal Pod Autoscalar (HPA), which watches a deployment and scales it up and down to keep a target metric constant. We configured our HPA for our microservice with the target of keeping target CPU usage at 50% (which never happens on the load, it will always be saturated), and thought the problem was solved. Alas, the problem started there!
We soon started hearing our platform engineers getting paged and woken up at midnight as our service was throwing 500s to the users. It was quite mysterious to begin with as the UI and the APIs serving it were working fine. For the first few days, the solution to clear the page was to wake up, visit the UI in the browser, and, hit refresh 5-6 times! This problem had to be solved.
Digging Deep
Since we knew that the 500s problem started after we configured the HPA, we knew it had to do something with it. We began digging it up in a lower environment.
The first thing that we had to do was delete the HPA and take the reins of scaling into our control. Fortunately, k9s provide an easy UI to scale a deployment up and down. We started with scaling our pod to 30, which took some time to get created. The scale triggered a new node allocation as well, as we run our lower environments as minimally as possible. When the deployment was scaling, we kept repeatedly hitting the UI in the browser and saw nothing suspicious. After this, we scaled down the deployment and saw nothing special as well. We thought hitting the UI manually was not enough and wrote a cURL script to do the task for us with a sleep of 0.1s.
Then we realized that our lower environment does not utilize an ingress, rather than a nginx proxy to keep things simple. We pin the traffic to go to one pod in the proxy. This is not an ideal production setup but sufficed for lower environments as we mostly run only one replica there.
Thus, we decided to create an Ingress in the lower environment to make it similar to the production one. Then, we repeated the exercise of scale-ups and scale-downs. We started seeing 504s and 503s in the script output both when scaling up and scaling down. Finally, we were able to reproduce the issue.
Health Checks
Google has good documentation on why 5xx errors happen during scale downs; it is due to the delay in the sync between the ingress and Kubernetes cluster. However, it does not explain the errors during scale-ups. Then, we had to carefully inspect our deployment yamls and found that we have defined the tcpSocket health check for our service.
While tcpSocket is a good check for the service which becomes ready to accept connections as soon as it can start up, it was not ideal for our service, as it has to do some initial service discoveries. We use Consul to do service discovery and run it in the pod along with the service container. And, it is sometimes slower to start than our service itself. This makes our application crash if the Consul is too late to start. Eventually, our service becomes healthy after several crashes when the Consul is fully up.
This meant that we had to implement an API endpoint returning the status of consul, and use that in the readinessProbe through httpGet. We used the same API for livenessProbe as well, since we did not have other requirements for it. If our NodeJS process is struck (maybe doing a long-running CPU-bound task), it will not respond to the liveness probe, and eventually be killed by the k8s. We tested new health checks and verified that they were working well. It was the time for a new rapid scale-up and scale-down test.
And, to our surprise, we did not see any changes, the errors continued coming up despite setting the same health check on Ingress BackendConfig as well!
A deviation
This time, we wanted to do the test from inside the cluster using cluster local DNS. We jumped into one of our containers (again, k9s makes it very easy) and ran the script. This time, no errors while scaling up and down!
This could mean one thing - there is something fishy going on with GKE’s Ingress. We have to report the issue with an MWE yet, but we wanted a solution for this problem immediately as the users were complaining about the issues a lot.
The Solution
We knew that this service supported two sets of use cases - processing the data and serving the front end and APIs. The scaling was caused by data processing while the frontend traffic is predictable and steady. Thus, we can have two sets of pods
- To serve frontend traffic - with a constant number of replicas and behind a service and exposed through Ingress
- To serve data processing needs - with a HPA, not exposed to the public
This was an easy solution for us as all our data processing inputs came through MQ, and we had a listenToMqMessages function to set up the listeners. If we ever had an API to handle data ingestion, we would simply write a message to MQ in the API.
In Kubernetes, we can’t have a single deployment serving both needs. So, we created a service-noweb deployment that sets an environment variable NO_WEB=true. Our application checks for the value of this variable and turns on listening to MQ messages. The NO_WEB=false deployments can still write to MQ, but can’t listen to any messages.
Now, we have two deployments of the same application hosted for different needs. Even in the case of heavy data processing loads, the UI and associated APIs are not impacted as the data processing happens independently.
Thoughts
This solution is simple and feels hacky. Shouldn’t the scaling have happened smoothly and have protected us from doing all these? - Ideally yes. But the world is not as simple as that. Google recommends setting a hook before pod termination just to buy them time to unregister the pod from the Ingress. I feel that is a hacky thing to do - as it is not obvious from just seeing the configuration why it is there.
This exercise resulted in copy-pasting the entire deployment spec, just to change the names and add a new environment variable - this is not DRY. We are considering moving this to FluxCD with kustomization templates to solve this.
However, there might be a real case where we want to scale our web frontends up one day in the future. This solution does not take care of that at all assuming the traffic is constant and a pre-determined number of replicas are sufficient to handle them. When that would be the case, I think GKE Ingress would have a fix in place.
We had another microservice facing a similar issue. But it was hard to split it into critical and non-critical paths as we did in the case of this microservice. We are exploring running haproxy pods behind ingress (they reconcile faster than the Ingress controller), which will then route the traffic to this microservice - This is more hackier than splitting the microservice. We would not have needed all of this if the GKE platform implementation of the Ingress controller was perfect.
Moving beyond
The exercise of splitting the microservice into two deployments made me think about Modular Monoliths for a bit. We already host all our NodeJS applications under a monorepo and greatly benefit from code sharing across projects without having to set up package publishing infrastructure. Instead of monorepo, what if we had a monolith with some rules about code organization, that generates several microservice bundles? I will be processing this thought for some time and will come up with an article soon … Stay tuned!