Scaling Kubernetes to Thousands of Nodes Across Multiple Clusters, Calmly
In under a year, Airbnb went from 600 Kubernetes nodes across a couple handcrafted clusters to over 5000 nodes on tens of clusters. Successful adoption of Kubernetes by services led to more and faster …
| Talk Title | Scaling Kubernetes to Thousands of Nodes Across Multiple Clusters, Calmly |
| Speakers | Ben Hughes (Software Engineer, Airbnb) |
| Conference | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America |
| Conf Tag | |
| Location | San Diego, CA, USA |
| Date | Nov 15-21, 2019 |
| URL | Talk Page |
| Slides | Talk Slides |
| Video | |
In under a year, Airbnb went from 600 Kubernetes nodes across a couple handcrafted clusters to over 5000 nodes on tens of clusters. Successful adoption of Kubernetes by services led to more and faster adoption leading to challenges of scale. Facing this, Airbnb switched to a multiple production cluster architecture to get around single cluster scalability limits and ensure ample capacity for services.This process increased the consistency of the cluster configurations while reducing manual operations. This talk will discuss the problems that were faced during scaling, the shape of the solutions, specific approaches that worked well (and didn’t), and how this was accomplished without a drastic shift away from existing pre-Kubernetes infrastructure tooling. A key result was reducing the time to create a new, production-ready cluster from over a week to under an hour.
