Page last modified on November 15, 2018 at 2:05 PM PST by Initial commit (Page history)
Kubernetes 1.8
alpha
Kubernetes 1.11
beta
Pods can have priority. Priority indicates the importance of a Pod relative to other Pods. If a Pod cannot be scheduled, the scheduler tries to preempt (evict) lower priority Pods to make scheduling of the pending Pod possible.
In Kubernetes 1.9 and later, Priority also affects scheduling order of Pods and out-of-resource eviction ordering on the Node.
Pod priority and preemption are moved to beta since Kubernetes 1.11 and are enabled by default in this release and later.
In Kubernetes versions where Pod priority and preemption is still an alpha-level feature, you need to explicitly enable it. To use these features in the older versions of Kubernetes, follow the instructions in the documentation for your Kubernetes version, by going to the documentation archive version for your Kubernetes version.
| Kubernetes Version | Priority and Preemption State | Enabled by default |
|---|---|---|
| 1.8 | alpha | no |
| 1.9 | alpha | no |
| 1.10 | alpha | no |
| 1.11 | beta | yes |
Warning: In a cluster where not all users are trusted, a malicious user could create pods at the highest possible priorities, causing other pods to be evicted/not get scheduled. To resolve this issue, ResourceQuota is augmented to support Pod priority. An admin can create ResourceQuota for users at specific priority levels, preventing them from creating pods at high priorities. However, this feature is in alpha as of Kubernetes 1.11.
To use priority and preemption in Kubernetes 1.11 and later, follow these steps:
Add one or more PriorityClasses.
Create Pods withpriorityClassName set to one of the added
PriorityClasses. Of course you do not need to create the Pods directly;
normally you would add priorityClassName to the Pod template of a
collection object like a Deployment.
Keep reading for more information about these steps.
If you try the feature and then decide to disable it, you must remove the
PodPriority command-line flag or set it to false, and then restart the API
server and scheduler. After the feature is disabled, the existing Pods keep
their priority fields, but preemption is disabled, and priority fields are
ignored. If the feature is disabled, you cannot set priorityClassName in new
Pods.
Note: In Kubernetes 1.11, critical pods (except DaemonSet pods, which are still scheduled by the DaemonSet controller) rely on scheduler preemption to be scheduled when a cluster is under resource pressure. For this reason, you will need to run an older version of Rescheduler if you decide to disable preemption. More on this is provided below.
Disabling Pod priority disables preemption as well. In order to disable Pod Priority, set the feature to false for API server, Scheduler, and Kubelet. Disabling the feature on Kubelets is not vital. You can leave the feature on for Kubelets if rolling out is hard.
--feature-gates=PodPriority=false
In Kubernetes 1.11 and later, preemption is controlled by a kube-scheduler flag
disablePreemption, which is set to false by default.
This option is available in component configs only and is not available in old-style command line options. Below is a sample component config to disable preemption:
apiVersion: componentconfig/v1alpha1
kind: KubeSchedulerConfiguration
algorithmSource:
provider: DefaultProvider
...
disablePreemption: trueWhen priority or preemption is disabled, we must run Rescheduler v0.3.1 (instead of v0.4.0) to ensure that critical Pods are scheduled when nodes or cluster are under resource pressure. Since critical Pod annotation is still supported in this release, running Rescheduler should be enough and no other changes to the configuration of Pods should be needed.
Rescheduler images can be found at: gcr.io/k8s-image-staging/rescheduler.
In the code, changing the Rescheduler version back to v.0.3.1 is the reverse of this PR.
A PriorityClass is a non-namespaced object that defines a mapping from a
priority class name to the integer value of the priority. The name is specified
in the name field of the PriorityClass object’s metadata. The value is
specified in the required value field. The higher the value, the higher the
priority.
A PriorityClass object can have any 32-bit integer value smaller than or equal to 1 billion. Larger numbers are reserved for critical system Pods that should not normally be preempted or evicted. A cluster admin should create one PriorityClass object for each such mapping that they want.
PriorityClass also has two optional fields: globalDefault and description.
The globalDefault field indicates that the value of this PriorityClass should
be used for Pods without a priorityClassName. Only one PriorityClass with
globalDefault set to true can exist in the system. If there is no
PriorityClass with globalDefault set, the priority of Pods with no
priorityClassName is zero.
The description field is an arbitrary string. It is meant to tell users of the
cluster when they should use this PriorityClass.
If you upgrade your existing cluster and enable this feature, the priority of your existing Pods is effectively zero.
Addition of a PriorityClass with globalDefault set to true does not
change the priorities of existing Pods. The value of such a PriorityClass is
used only for Pods created after the PriorityClass is added.
If you delete a PriorityClass, existing Pods that use the name of the deleted PriorityClass remain unchanged, but you cannot create more Pods that use the name of the deleted PriorityClass.
apiVersion: scheduling.k8s.io/v1alpha1
kind: PriorityClass
metadata:
name: high-priority
value: 1000000
globalDefault: false
description: "This priority class should be used for XYZ service pods only."After you have one or more PriorityClasses, you can create Pods that specify one
of those PriorityClass names in their specifications. The priority admission
controller uses the priorityClassName field and populates the integer value of
the priority. If the priority class is not found, the Pod is rejected.
The following YAML is an example of a Pod configuration that uses the PriorityClass created in the preceding example. The priority admission controller checks the specification and resolves the priority of the Pod to 1000000.
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: nginx
labels:
env: test
spec:
containers:
- name: nginx
image: nginx
imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
priorityClassName: high-priorityIn Kubernetes 1.9 and later, when Pod priority is enabled, scheduler orders pending Pods by their priority and a pending Pod is placed ahead of other pending Pods with lower priority in the scheduling queue. As a result, the higher priority Pod may by scheduled sooner that Pods with lower priority if its scheduling requirements are met. If such Pod cannot be scheduled, scheduler will continue and tries to schedule other lower priority Pods.
When Pods are created, they go to a queue and wait to be scheduled. The scheduler picks a Pod from the queue and tries to schedule it on a Node. If no Node is found that satisfies all the specified requirements of the Pod, preemption logic is triggered for the pending Pod. Let’s call the pending Pod P. Preemption logic tries to find a Node where removal of one or more Pods with lower priority than P would enable P to be scheduled on that Node. If such a Node is found, one or more lower priority Pods get deleted from the Node. After the Pods are gone, P can be scheduled on the Node.
When Pod P preempts one or more Pods on Node N, nominatedNodeName field of Pod
P’s status is set to the name of Node N. This field helps scheduler track
resources reserved for Pod P and also gives users information about preemptions
in their clusters.
Please note that Pod P is not necessarily scheduled to the “nominated Node”.
After victim Pods are preempted, they get their graceful termination period. If
another node becomes available while scheduler is waiting for the victim Pods to
terminate, scheduler will use the other node to schedule Pod P. As a result
nominatedNodeName and nodeName of Pod spec are not always the same. Also, if
scheduler preempts Pods on Node N, but then a higher priority Pod than Pod P
arrives, scheduler may give Node N to the new higher priority Pod. In such a
case, scheduler clears nominatedNodeName of Pod P. By doing this, scheduler
makes Pod P eligible to preempt Pods on another Node.
When Pods are preempted, the victims get their graceful termination period. They have that much time to finish their work and exit. If they don’t, they are killed. This graceful termination period creates a time gap between the point that the scheduler preempts Pods and the time when the pending Pod (P) can be scheduled on the Node (N). In the meantime, the scheduler keeps scheduling other pending Pods. As victims exit or get terminated, the scheduler tries to schedule Pods in the pending queue. Therefore, there is usually a time gap between the point that scheduler preempts victims and the time that Pod P is scheduled. In order to minimize this gap, one can set graceful termination period of lower priority Pods to zero or a small number.
A Pod Disruption Budget (PDB) allows application owners to limit the number Pods of a replicated application that are down simultaneously from voluntary disruptions. Kubernetes 1.9 supports PDB when preempting Pods, but respecting PDB is best effort. The Scheduler tries to find victims whose PDB are not violated by preemption, but if no such victims are found, preemption will still happen, and lower priority Pods will be removed despite their PDBs being violated.
A Node is considered for preemption only when the answer to this question is yes: “If all the Pods with lower priority than the pending Pod are removed from the Node, can the pending Pod be scheduled on the Node?”
Note: Preemption does not necessarily remove all lower-priority Pods. If the pending Pod can be scheduled by removing fewer than all lower-priority Pods, then only a portion of the lower-priority Pods are removed. Even so, the answer to the preceding question must be yes. If the answer is no, the Node is not considered for preemption.
If a pending Pod has inter-pod affinity to one or more of the lower-priority Pods on the Node, the inter-Pod affinity rule cannot be satisfied in the absence of those lower-priority Pods. In this case, the scheduler does not preempt any Pods on the Node. Instead, it looks for another Node. The scheduler might find a suitable Node or it might not. There is no guarantee that the pending Pod can be scheduled.
Our recommended solution for this problem is to create inter-Pod affinity only towards equal or higher priority Pods.
Suppose a Node N is being considered for preemption so that a pending Pod P can be scheduled on N. P might become feasible on N only if a Pod on another Node is preempted. Here’s an example:
topologyKey:
failure-domain.beta.kubernetes.io/zone).If Pod Q were removed from its Node, the Pod anti-affinity violation would be gone, and Pod P could possibly be scheduled on Node N.
We may consider adding cross Node preemption in future versions if we find an algorithm with reasonable performance. We cannot promise anything at this point, and cross Node preemption will not be considered a blocker for Beta or GA.
Pod Priority and Preemption is a major feature that could potentially disrupt Pod scheduling if it has bugs.
The followings are some of the potential problems that could be caused by bugs in the implementation of the feature. This list is not exhaustive.
Preemption removes existing Pods from a cluster under resource pressure to make
room for higher priority pending Pods. If a user gives high priorities to
certain Pods by mistake, these unintentional high priority Pods may cause
preemption in the cluster. As mentioned above, Pod priority is specified by
setting the priorityClassName field of podSpec. The integer value of
priority is then resolved and populated to the priority field of podSpec.
To resolve the problem, priorityClassName of the Pods must be changed to use
lower priority classes or should be left empty. Empty priorityClassName is
resolved to zero by default.
When a Pod is preempted, there will be events recorded for the preempted Pod. Preemption should happen only when a cluster does not have enough resources for a Pod. In such cases, preemption happens only when the priority of the pending Pod (preemptor) is higher than the victim Pods. Preemption must not happen when there is no pending Pod, or when the pending Pods have equal or higher priority than the victims. If preemption happens in such scenarios, please file an issue.
When pods are preempted, they receive their requested graceful termination period, which is by default 30 seconds, but it can be any different value as specified in the PodSpec. If the victim Pods do not terminate within this period they are force-terminated. Once all the victims go away, the preemptor Pod can be scheduled.
While the preemptor Pod is waiting for the victims to go away, a higher priority Pod may be created that fits on the same node. In this case, the scheduler will schedule the higher priority Pod instead of the preemptor.
In the absence of such a higher priority Pod, we expect the preemptor Pod to be scheduled after the graceful termination period of the victims is over.
The scheduler tries to find nodes that can run a pending Pod and if no node is found, it tries to remove Pods with lower priority from one node to make room for the pending pod. If a node with low priority Pods is not feasible to run the pending Pod, the scheduler may choose another node with higher priority Pods (compared to the Pods on the other node) for preemption. The victims must still have lower priority than the preemptor Pod.
When there are multiple nodes available for preemption, the scheduler tries to choose the node with a set of Pods with lowest priority. However, if such Pods have PodDisruptionBudget that would be violated if they are preempted then the scheduler may choose another node with higher priority Pods.
When multiple nodes exist for preemption and none of the above scenarios apply, we expect the scheduler to choose a node with the lowest priority. If that is not the case, it may indicate a bug in the scheduler.
Pod priority and
QoS
are two orthogonal features with few interactions and no default restrictions on
setting the priority of a Pod based on its QoS classes. The scheduler’s
preemption logic does consider QoS when choosing preemption targets. Preemption
considers Pod priority and attempts to choose a set of targets with the lowest
priority. Higher-priority Pods are considered for preemption only if the removal
of the lowest priority Pods is not sufficient to allow the scheduler to schedule
the preemptor Pod, or if the lowest priority Pods are protected by
PodDisruptionBudget.
The only component that considers both QoS and Pod priority is Kubelet out-of-resource eviction. The kubelet ranks Pods for eviction first by whether or not their usage of the starved resource exceeds requests, then by Priority, and then by the consumption of the starved compute resource relative to the Pods’ scheduling requests. See Evicting end-user pods for more details. Kubelet out-of-resource eviction does not evict Pods whose usage does not exceed their requests. If a Pod with lower priority is not exceeding its requests, it won’t be evicted. Another Pod with higher priority that exceeds its requests may be evicted.