Specifying a Disruption Budget for your Application (original) (raw)

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.21 [stable]

This page shows how to limit the number of concurrent disruptions that your application experiences, allowing for higher availability while permitting the cluster administrator to manage the clusters nodes.

Before you begin

Your Kubernetes server must be at or later than version v1.21.

To check the version, enter kubectl version.

Protecting an Application with a PodDisruptionBudget

  1. Identify what application you want to protect with a PodDisruptionBudget (PDB).
  2. Think about how your application reacts to disruptions.
  3. Create a PDB definition as a YAML file.
  4. Create the PDB object from the YAML file.

Identify an Application to Protect

The most common use case when you want to protect an application specified by one of the built-in Kubernetes controllers:

In this case, make a note of the controller's .spec.selector; the same selector goes into the PDBs .spec.selector.

From version 1.15 PDBs support custom controllers where thescale subresourceis enabled.

You can also use PDBs with pods which are not controlled by one of the above controllers, or arbitrary groups of pods, but there are some restrictions, described in Arbitrary workloads and arbitrary selectors.

Think about how your application reacts to disruptions

Decide how many instances can be down at the same time for a short period due to a voluntary disruption.

Rounding logic when specifying percentages

Values for minAvailable or maxUnavailable can be expressed as integers or as a percentage.

When you specify the value as a percentage, it may not map to an exact number of Pods. For example, if you have 7 Pods and you set minAvailable to "50%", it's not immediately obvious whether that means 3 Pods or 4 Pods must be available. Kubernetes rounds up to the nearest integer, so in this case, 4 Pods must be available. When you specify the value maxUnavailable as a percentage, Kubernetes rounds up the number of Pods that may be disrupted. Thereby a disruption can exceed your definedmaxUnavailable percentage. You can examine thecodethat controls this behavior.

Specifying a PodDisruptionBudget

A PodDisruptionBudget has three fields:

You can specify only one of maxUnavailable and minAvailable in a single PodDisruptionBudget.maxUnavailable can only be used to control the eviction of pods that have an associated controller managing them. In the examples below, "desired replicas" is the scale of the controller managing the pods being selected by thePodDisruptionBudget.

Example 1: With a minAvailable of 5, evictions are allowed as long as they leave behind 5 or more healthy pods among those selected by the PodDisruptionBudget's selector.

Example 2: With a minAvailable of 30%, evictions are allowed as long as at least 30% of the number of desired replicas are healthy.

Example 3: With a maxUnavailable of 5, evictions are allowed as long as there are at most 5 unhealthy replicas among the total number of desired replicas.

Example 4: With a maxUnavailable of 30%, evictions are allowed as long as the number of unhealthy replicas does not exceed 30% of the total number of desired replica rounded up to the nearest integer. If the total number of desired replicas is just one, that single replica is still allowed for disruption, leading to an effective unavailability of 100%.

In typical usage, a single budget would be used for a collection of pods managed by a controller—for example, the pods in a single ReplicaSet or StatefulSet.

If you set maxUnavailable to 0% or 0, or you set minAvailable to 100% or the number of replicas, you are requiring zero voluntary evictions. When you set zero voluntary evictions for a workload object such as ReplicaSet, then you cannot successfully drain a Node running one of those Pods. If you try to drain a Node where an unevictable Pod is running, the drain never completes. This is permitted as per the semantics of PodDisruptionBudget.

You can find examples of pod disruption budgets defined below. They match pods with the labelapp: zookeeper.

Example PDB Using minAvailable:

apiVersion: policy/v1
kind: PodDisruptionBudget
metadata:
  name: zk-pdb
spec:
  minAvailable: 2
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: zookeeper

Example PDB Using maxUnavailable:

apiVersion: policy/v1
kind: PodDisruptionBudget
metadata:
  name: zk-pdb
spec:
  maxUnavailable: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: zookeeper

For example, if the above zk-pdb object selects the pods of a StatefulSet of size 3, both specifications have the exact same meaning. The use of maxUnavailable is recommended as it automatically responds to changes in the number of replicas of the corresponding controller.

Create the PDB object

You can create or update the PDB object using kubectl.

kubectl apply -f mypdb.yaml

Check the status of the PDB

Use kubectl to check that your PDB is created.

Assuming you don't actually have pods matching app: zookeeper in your namespace, then you'll see something like this:

kubectl get poddisruptionbudgets

NAME     MIN AVAILABLE   MAX UNAVAILABLE   ALLOWED DISRUPTIONS   AGE
zk-pdb   2               N/A               0                     7s

If there are matching pods (say, 3), then you would see something like this:

kubectl get poddisruptionbudgets

NAME     MIN AVAILABLE   MAX UNAVAILABLE   ALLOWED DISRUPTIONS   AGE
zk-pdb   2               N/A               1                     7s

The non-zero value for ALLOWED DISRUPTIONS means that the disruption controller has seen the pods, counted the matching pods, and updated the status of the PDB.

You can get more information about the status of a PDB with this command:

kubectl get poddisruptionbudgets zk-pdb -o yaml

apiVersion: policy/v1
kind: PodDisruptionBudget
metadata:
  annotations:
…
  creationTimestamp: "2020-03-04T04:22:56Z"
  generation: 1
  name: zk-pdb
…
status:
  currentHealthy: 3
  desiredHealthy: 2
  disruptionsAllowed: 1
  expectedPods: 3
  observedGeneration: 1

Healthiness of a Pod

The current implementation considers healthy pods, as pods that have .status.conditionsitem with type="Ready" and status="True". These pods are tracked via .status.currentHealthy field in the PDB status.

Unhealthy Pod Eviction Policy

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.31 [stable] (enabled by default: true)

PodDisruptionBudget guarding an application ensures that .status.currentHealthy number of pods does not fall below the number specified in .status.desiredHealthy by disallowing eviction of healthy pods. By using .spec.unhealthyPodEvictionPolicy, you can also define the criteria when unhealthy pods should be considered for eviction. The default behavior when no policy is specified corresponds to the IfHealthyBudget policy.

Policies:

IfHealthyBudget

Running pods (.status.phase="Running"), but not yet healthy can be evicted only if the guarded application is not disrupted (.status.currentHealthy is at least equal to .status.desiredHealthy).

This policy ensures that running pods of an already disrupted application have the best chance to become healthy. This has negative implications for draining nodes, which can be blocked by misbehaving applications that are guarded by a PDB. More specifically applications with pods in CrashLoopBackOff state (due to a bug or misconfiguration), or pods that are just failing to report theReady condition.

AlwaysAllow

Running pods (.status.phase="Running"), but not yet healthy are considered disrupted and can be evicted regardless of whether the criteria in a PDB is met.

This means prospective running pods of a disrupted application might not get a chance to become healthy. By using this policy, cluster managers can easily evict misbehaving applications that are guarded by a PDB. More specifically applications with pods in CrashLoopBackOff state (due to a bug or misconfiguration), or pods that are just failing to report the Ready condition.

Arbitrary workloads and arbitrary selectors

You can skip this section if you only use PDBs with the built-in workload resources (Deployment, ReplicaSet, StatefulSet and ReplicationController) or with custom resourcesthat implement a scale subresource, and where the PDB selector exactly matches the selector of the Pod's owning resource.

You can use a PDB with pods controlled by another resource, by an "operator", or bare pods, but with these restrictions:

It is not possible to use other availability configurations, because Kubernetes cannot derive a total number of pods without a supported owning resource.

You can use a selector which selects a subset or superset of the pods belonging to a workload resource. The eviction API will disallow eviction of any pod covered by multiple PDBs, so most users will want to avoid overlapping selectors. One reasonable use of overlapping PDBs is when pods are being transitioned from one PDB to another.