Performance Testing Ingress for Internet-Scale Workloads

Have you ever wondered how much ingress traffic a Kubernetes cluster could handle? How many nodes would it take to handle the traffic of an Alexa top-40 website? Understanding these numbers and how yo …

Have you ever wondered how much ingress traffic a Kubernetes cluster could handle? How many nodes would it take to handle the traffic of an Alexa top-40 website? Understanding these numbers and how your ingress infrastructure scales is critical when it comes to deploying internet-accessible applications in production.   At Heptio, we needed to prove that our Envoy-based ingress projects, Contour and Gimbal, would scale to support millions of concurrent connections, thousands of backend services, and thousands of virtual hosts.  In this talk, we will explore the strategies and tools we used, the challenges we faced and the lessons we learned while running these tests. We will dive into kernel tuning, HTTP benchmarking, Envoy metrics, and more. We hope that talking about our experience will help when it comes to performance testing your cloud-native applications and infrastructure.