API Gateway performance comparison between Kubernetes and Native. TPS 20% loss

9/24/2019

I am new to Kubernetes.
Last few days, I did performance test for API Gateway to compare both environments, Kubernetes and Native.
I expected to get similar results in both types of tests, but the second test showed a 20% tps loss.

How to stress : RestfulAPI requests through API Gateway.
Env 1 : Native (CentOS) - result : approximately 1700 tps
Evn 2 : Kubernetes - result : approximately 1350 tps
* Hardware specifications were the same.

I wonder if this is a common result.
In my opinion, 20% is too much loss.

Sorry for my stupid question, but I am confused.

-- ironrainbow
kubernetes

1 Answer

9/24/2019

According to k8s documentation

Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available.

The name Kubernetes originates from Greek, meaning helmsman or pilot.

Wikipedia also says:

Kubernetes (κυβερνήτης, Greek for "governor", "helmsman" or "captain")

Obviously, the captain’s advantages are not in speed but in the predictability of the work of the entire complex system as a whole

k8s strengths are:

  • Service discovery and load balancing
  • Storage orchestration
  • Automated rollouts and rollbacks
  • Automatic bin packing
  • Self-healing
  • Secret and configuration management

As you can see, the performance gain is not mentioned here.

P.S. There is great comment on HN discussion about Serverless hype (TL;DR: slowness and costiness):

It's concerning how typical the hype machine is in IT. I believe Serverless has its place and value. So does Kubernetes or many other products that are often discussed on HN.

But let's be clear, we are talking about commercial products and there is a capital interest in selling these services to all of us devs and engineers.

So while use cases exists and benefits wait to be reaped, as a consultant I strongly feel that we should be MUCH more insistent in pointing out when a product does not make sense instead of jumping onto the hype train.

I am basically surrounded by "LETS TRANSFORM EVERYTHING TO KUBERNETES THIS WEEK!" exclamations, conferences are basically "DID YOU ALREADY HEAR ABOUT KUBERNETES?" and so on ...

It reminds me of Ruby on Rails, a mature and well-developed framework used by global tech firms (correct me if wrong: Airbnb, ~Stack Overflow~, Github) to handle parts of their backend in 2019. But for half a decade now even tiny companies have been screaming around about FancyHTTPTechThisYear (tm) because scale while reporting 1/500th of the traffic of some famous Rails users.

This is not engineering with objectives in mind, it's more akin to the gaming community yelling for a new console.

-- Yasen
Source: StackOverflow