Good Shepherds Care For Their Cattle: Seamless Pod Migration in Geo-Distributed Kubernetes

Abstract

Container technology has become a very popular choice for easing and managing the deployment of cloud applications and services. Container orchestration systems such as Kubernetes can automate to a large extent the deployment, scaling, and operations for containers across clusters of nodes, reducing human errors and saving cost and time. Designed with "traditional" cloud environments in mind (i.e., large datacenters with close-by machines connected by high-speed networks), systems like Kubernetes present some limitations in geo-distributed environments where computational workloads are moved to the edges of the network, close to where data is being generated/consumed. In geo-distributed environments, moving around containers, either to follow moving data sources/sinks or due to unpredictable changes in the network substrate, is a rather common operation. We present MyceDrive, a stateful resource migration solution natively integrated with the Kubernetes orchestrator. We show that geo-distributed Kubernetes pod migration is feasible while remaining fully transparent to the migrated application as well as its clients, while reducing downtimes up to 7x compared to state-of-the-art solutions.