Scaling Spin App With Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA)

This tutorial illustrates how one can horizontally scale Spin Apps in Kubernetes using Horizontal Pod Autscaling (HPA)
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Horizontal scaling, in the Kubernetes sense, means deploying more pods to meet demand (different from vertical scaling whereby more memory and CPU resources are assigned to already running pods). In this tutorial, we configure HPA to dynamically scale the instance count of our SpinApps to meet the demand.

Prerequisites

Please see the following sections in the Prerequisites page and fulfil those prerequisite requirements before continuing:

  • Docker - for running k3d
  • kubectl - the Kubernetes CLI
  • k3d - a lightweight Kubernetes distribution that runs on Docker
  • Helm - the package manager for Kubernetes
  • Bombardier - cross-platform HTTP benchmarking CLI

We use k3d to run a Kubernetes cluster locally as part of this tutorial, but you can follow these steps to configure HPA autoscaling on your desired Kubernetes environment.

Setting Up Kubernetes Cluster

Run the following command to create a Kubernetes cluster that has the containerd-shim-spin pre-requisites installed: If you have a Kubernetes cluster already, please feel free to use it:

k3d cluster create wasm-cluster-scale \
  --image ghcr.io/spinkube/containerd-shim-spin/k3d:v0.13.1 \
  -p "8081:80@loadbalancer" \
  --agents 2

Deploying Spin Operator and its dependencies

First, you have to install cert-manager to automatically provision and manage TLS certificates (used by Spin Operator’s admission webhook system). For detailed installation instructions see the cert-manager documentation.

# Install cert-manager CRDs
kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.3/cert-manager.crds.yaml

# Add and update Jetstack repository
helm repo add jetstack https://charts.jetstack.io
helm repo update

# Install the cert-manager Helm chart
helm install \
  cert-manager jetstack/cert-manager \
  --namespace cert-manager \
  --create-namespace \
  --version v1.14.3

Next, run the following commands to install the Spin Runtime Class and Spin Operator Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs):

Note: In a production cluster you likely want to customize the Runtime Class with a nodeSelector that matches nodes that have the shim installed. However, in the K3d example, they’re installed on every node.

# Install the RuntimeClass
kubectl apply -f https://github.com/spinkube/spin-operator/releases/download/v0.1.0/spin-operator.runtime-class.yaml

# Install the CRDs
kubectl apply -f https://github.com/spinkube/spin-operator/releases/download/v0.1.0/spin-operator.crds.yaml

Lastly, install Spin Operator using helm and the shim executor with the following commands:

# Install Spin Operator
helm install spin-operator \
  --namespace spin-operator \
  --create-namespace \
  --version 0.1.0 \
  --wait \
  oci://ghcr.io/spinkube/charts/spin-operator

# Install the shim executor
kubectl apply -f https://github.com/spinkube/spin-operator/releases/download/v0.1.0/spin-operator.shim-executor.yaml

Great, now you have Spin Operator up and running on your cluster. This means you’re set to create and deploy SpinApps later on in the tutorial.

Set Up Ingress

Use the following command to set up ingress on your Kubernetes cluster. This ensures traffic can reach your SpinApp once we’ve created it in future steps:

# Setup ingress following this tutorial https://k3d.io/v5.4.6/usage/exposing_services/
cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: nginx
  annotations:
    ingress.kubernetes.io/ssl-redirect: "false"
spec:
  rules:
  - http:
      paths:
      - path: /
        pathType: Prefix
        backend:
          service:
            name: hpa-spinapp
            port:
              number: 80
EOF

Hit enter to create the ingress resource.

Deploy Spin App and HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA)

Next up we’re going to deploy the Spin App we will be scaling. You can find the source code of the Spin App in the apps/cpu-load-gen folder of the Spin Operator repository.

We can take a look at the SpinApp and HPA definitions in our deployment file below/. As you can see, we have set our resources -> limits to 500m of cpu and 500Mi of memory per Spin application and we will scale the instance count when we’ve reached a 50% utilization in cpu and memory. We’ve also defined support a maximum replica count of 10 and a minimum replica count of 1:

apiVersion: core.spinoperator.dev/v1alpha1
kind: SpinApp
metadata:
  name: hpa-spinapp
spec:
  image: ghcr.io/spinkube/spin-operator/cpu-load-gen:20240311-163328-g1121986
  enableAutoscaling: true
  resources:
    limits:
      cpu: 500m
      memory: 500Mi
    requests:
      cpu: 100m
      memory: 400Mi
---
apiVersion: autoscaling/v2
kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
metadata:
  name: spinapp-autoscaler
spec:
  scaleTargetRef:
    apiVersion: apps/v1
    kind: Deployment
    name: hpa-spinapp
  minReplicas: 1
  maxReplicas: 10
  metrics:
    - type: Resource
      resource:
        name: cpu
        target:
          type: Utilization
          averageUtilization: 50

For more information about HPA, please visit the following links:

Below is an example of the configuration to scale resources:

apiVersion: core.spinoperator.dev/v1alpha1
kind: SpinApp
metadata:
  name: hpa-spinapp
spec:
  image: ghcr.io/spinkube/spin-operator/cpu-load-gen:20240311-163328-g1121986
  executor: containerd-shim-spin
  enableAutoscaling: true
  resources:
    limits:
      cpu: 500m
      memory: 500Mi
    requests:
      cpu: 100m
      memory: 400Mi
---
apiVersion: autoscaling/v2
kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
metadata:
  name: spinapp-autoscaler
spec:
  scaleTargetRef:
    apiVersion: apps/v1
    kind: Deployment
    name: hpa-spinapp
  minReplicas: 1
  maxReplicas: 10
  metrics:
  - type: Resource
    resource:
      name: cpu
      target:
        type: Utilization
        averageUtilization: 50

Let’s deploy the SpinApp and the HPA instance onto our cluster (using the above .yaml configuration). To apply the above configuration we use the following kubectl apply command:

# Install SpinApp and HPA
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spinkube/spin-operator/main/config/samples/hpa.yaml

You can see your running Spin application by running the following command:

kubectl get spinapps
NAME          AGE
hpa-spinapp   92m

You can also see your HPA instance with the following command:

kubectl get hpa
NAME                 REFERENCE                TARGETS   MINPODS   MAXPODS   REPLICAS   AGE
spinapp-autoscaler   Deployment/hpa-spinapp   6%/50%    1         10        1          97m

Please note: The Kubernetes Plugin for Spin is a tool designed for Kubernetes integration with the Spin command-line interface. The Kubernetes Plugin for Spin has a scaling tutorial that demonstrates how to use the spin kube command to tell Kubernetes when to scale your Spin application up or down based on demand).

Generate Load to Test Autoscale

Now let’s use Bombardier to generate traffic to test how well HPA scales our SpinApp. The following Bombardier command will attempt to establish 40 connections during a period of 3 minutes (or less). If a request is not responded to within 5 seconds that request will timeout:

# Generate a bunch of load
bombardier -c 40 -t 5s -d 3m http://localhost:8081

To watch the load, we can run the following command to get the status of our deployment:

kubectl describe deploy hpa-spinapp
...
---

Available      True    MinimumReplicasAvailable
Progressing    True    NewReplicaSetAvailable
OldReplicaSets:  <none>
NewReplicaSet:   hpa-spinapp-544c649cf4 (1/1 replicas created)
Events:
  Type    Reason             Age    From                   Message
  ----    ------             ----   ----                   -------
  Normal  ScalingReplicaSet  11m    deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set hpa-spinapp-544c649cf4 to 1
  Normal  ScalingReplicaSet  9m45s  deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set hpa-spinapp-544c649cf4  to 4
  Normal  ScalingReplicaSet  9m30s  deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set hpa-spinapp-544c649cf4  to 8
  Normal  ScalingReplicaSet  9m15s  deployment-controller  Scaled up replica set hpa-spinapp-544c649cf4  to 10

Last modified 24.04.2024: Merge pull request #153 from peterj/patch-2 (6099aab)