Handling thousands of services in Kubernetes cluster

6/24/2015

Some time ago I asked about handling thousands of services in a Kubernetes cluster:

Can Kubernetes handle thousands of services?

At that time Kubernetes was using env vars and my question was more oriented to that. Now that Kubernetes has a DNS sounds like we don't have the problem with env vars anymore, however the docs still says it won't perform well when handling thousands of services:

https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes/blob/master/docs/services.md#shortcomings

Wanted to know if documentation is outdated or if there are still issues to scale Kubernetes to thousands of services.

-- dgaviola
kubernetes

1 Answer

6/24/2015

The shortcoming mentioned in the documentation has not changed, because Kubernetes still uses the same mechanism (iptables and a userspace proxy) for proxying traffic sent to a service IP to the pods backing the service.

However, I don't believe we actually know how bad it is. A team member briefly tried testing it early this year and didn't see any impact, but didn't do anything rigorous to verify. It's possible that it'll work fine at a couple thousand services. If you try it, we'd love to hear how it goes via IRC or email.

-- Alex Robinson
Source: StackOverflow