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The Inefficiencies of Kubernetes

A report of cloud Kubernetes usage shows that these resources are being under-utiliized, over-provisioned, and costing more than necessary for many organizations. From the previous year, average CPU declined from 13% to 10%, and memory is used at only around 23%. Companies are over-provisioning their clusters, which is understandable. No one wants to have systems overloaded and users complaining about performance.

However, this is a similar tension to what we see with virtualization on-premises. Operations people want to leave plenty of CPU/RAM/IO headroom for systems to handle bursting or increasing workloads. Management wants to get all the use they can out of their investment and would prefer we provision systems as closely as possible to their expected workloads. Containers and orchestrators should allow a closer match, but only if there are workloads that burst enough to require additional containers and pods to be deployed. That does happen with memory occasionally at a little over 5% of containers exceed their memory, but that's not a significant amount.

Managing a Kubernetes cluster is a specialized skill and most organizations don't have the skills or experience to do it well. My view is that if you want to use an orchestrator, you're better off letting the cloud providers manage the infrastructure and scale up and down as needed. There are autoscaling technologies to help Operations staff better manage their capacity and costs, but this is an additional skill people need.

While I do think some companies are adopting cloud native technologies and rewriting their applications to run in containers and Kubernetes clusters, I find many more companies are hesitant to adopt a very complex technology on top of the complexity of teaching their developers to work within containers for their applications. Certainly in the Microsoft space, I don't see a lot of database servers running in containers. Despite some of the advantages of upgrades and downgrades, the unfamiliarity with the ins and outs of containers leads most teams to continue to manage the database separately.

Resource matching to a workload is a problem we've had for years and Kubernetes doesn't make this any easier to deal with. The cloud is supposed to help us better manage our resources, but there is a lot of knowledge needed to do this well. Add in the cost/performance issues in the cloud and it's no wonder that many companies have overprovisioned their resources to ensure systems continue running. I don't know whether lots of IT staffers are optimistic about their workload growth or scared of potential problems from overloaded systems, but unless organizations carefully manage all their resources, they are likely to continue to see larger cloud bills than they like.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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