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Scheduling Hazelcast Pods

Kubernetes allows assigning Pods to certain nodes. Hazelcast Platform operator also accepts same policies to explicitly allow or disallow certain assignments. Detailed documentation about scheduling policies can be found in Kubernetes docs.

The Management Center specification also supports the same capabilities.

You can make sure that pods for Hazelcast members are run on certain nodes, using the following scheduling principles of Kubernetes: node selector, node affinity, taints, and tolerations.

Node Selector

A node selector is a hard requirement that defines the nodes on which pods should run. If no node matches the requirements then the pods are not scheduled to be run. For example, you may want to make sure that Hazelcast pods are run only on nodes in a specific region. To define the nodes on which Hazelcast pods should run, you can use the nodeSelector.

For example, to run Hazelcast pods on a node in the us-west1 region, you can use the following example. This example uses the built-in topology.kubernetes.io/region label to specify that the pod should be run on nodes in the us-west1 region.

  • Hazelcast

  • Management Center

apiVersion: hazelcast.com/v1alpha1
kind: Hazelcast
metadata:
  name: hazelcast
spec:
  scheduling:
    nodeSelector:
      topology.kubernetes.io/region: us-west1
apiVersion: hazelcast.com/v1alpha1
kind: ManagementCenter
metadata:
  name: managementcenter
spec:
  scheduling:
    nodeSelector:
      topology.kubernetes.io/region: us-west1

For more information about node selectors see the Kubernetes docs.

Node Affinity

Node affinity allows you to define both hard and soft requirements for the nodes on which pods should run. For example, you can set a hard requirement for Hazelcast pods to run only on nodes with AMD64 architecture and Linux operating system, and a soft requirement to prefer nodes in us-west1 or us-west2 regions.

This example is not supported by the node selector because of the soft requirement.

To define a node affinity, use the nodeAffinity field of PodSpec.

The example below will satisfy the scenario above:

  • Hazelcast

  • Management Center

apiVersion: hazelcast.com/v1alpha1
kind: Hazelcast
metadata:
  name: hazelcast
spec:
  scheduling:
    affinity:
      nodeAffinity:
        requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
          nodeSelectorTerms:
            - matchExpressions:
              - key: kubernetes.io/arch
                operator: In
                values:
                  - amd64
              - key: kubernetes.io/os
                operator: In
                values:
                  - linux
        preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
          - weight: 15
            preference:
              matchExpressions:
                - key: topology.kubernetes.io/region
                  operator: In
                  values:
                    - us-west1
                    - us-west2
apiVersion: hazelcast.com/v1alpha1
kind: ManagementCenter
metadata:
  name: managementcenter
spec:
  scheduling:
    affinity:
      nodeAffinity:
        requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
          nodeSelectorTerms:
            - matchExpressions:
              - key: kubernetes.io/arch
                operator: In
                values:
                  - amd64
              - key: kubernetes.io/os
                operator: In
                values:
                  - linux
        preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
          - weight: 15
            preference:
              matchExpressions:
                - key: topology.kubernetes.io/region
                  operator: In
                  values:
                    - us-west1
                    - us-west2

For more information about node affinity see the Kubernetes docs.

Pod Affinity and Pod Anti-Affinity

You can specify pod affinity and pod anti-affinity to define on which nodes Hazelcast instances run with respect to other pods. For example, you may want to run Hazelcast pods on the same nodes as the pods of Deployment app1 because your application’s performance will be improved if the pods are co-located. You may also prefer that Hazelcast pods run on different nodes with respect to each other but since there might be small number of nodes, you don’t want to block the scheduler if the number of Hazelcast pods is greater than the number of nodes.

  • Hazelcast

  • Management Center

apiVersion: hazelcast.com/v1alpha1
kind: Hazelcast
metadata:
  name: hazelcast
spec:
  scheduling:
    affinity:
      podAffinity:
        requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
          - labelSelector:
              matchExpressions:
                - key: app
                  operator: In
                  values:
                    - app1
            topologyKey: kubernetes.io/hostname
        podAntiAffinity:
          preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
            - weight: 10
              podAffinityTerm:
                labelSelector:
                  matchExpressions:
                    - key: app.kubernetes.io/instance
                      operator: In
                      values:
                        - hazelcast
                topologyKey: kubernetes.io/hostname
apiVersion: hazelcast.com/v1alpha1
kind: ManagementCenter
metadata:
  name: managementcenter
spec:
  scheduling:
    affinity:
      podAffinity:
        requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
          - labelSelector:
              matchExpressions:
                - key: app
                  operator: In
                  values:
                    - app1
            topologyKey: kubernetes.io/hostname
        podAntiAffinity:
          preferredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
            - weight: 10
              podAffinityTerm:
                labelSelector:
                  matchExpressions:
                    - key: app.kubernetes.io/instance
                      operator: In
                      values:
                        - hazelcast
                topologyKey: kubernetes.io/hostname

For more information about pod affinity see the Kubernetes docs.

Tolerations

Tolerations and corresponding taints are mechanisms to repel pods from certain nodes. Nodes can be tainted with key, value and particular effect.

This example taints the node node1:

kubectl taint nodes node1 forbidden:NoSchedule

The following configuration cannot schedule any Hazelcast pods on node1:

  • Hazelcast

  • Management Center

apiVersion: hazelcast.com/v1alpha1
kind: Hazelcast
metadata:
  name: hazelcast-sample
spec:
  clusterSize: 3
  repository: 'docker.io/hazelcast/hazelcast'
  version: '5.1.1-slim'
apiVersion: hazelcast.com/v1alpha1
kind: ManagementCenter
metadata:
  name: managementcenter-sample
spec:
  repository: 'hazelcast/management-center'
  version: '5.1.1'
  externalConnectivity:
    type: LoadBalancer
  hazelcastClusters:
    - address: hazelcast-sample
      name: dev
  persistence:
    enabled: true
    size: 10Gi

To allow the pods to run on the node node1, you need to add tolerations to the Hazelcast pods:

  • Hazelcast

  • Management Center

apiVersion: hazelcast.com/v1alpha1
kind: Hazelcast
metadata:
  name: hazelcast
spec:
  scheduling:
    tolerations:
      - key: "forbidden"
        operator: "Exists"
        effect: "NoSchedule"
apiVersion: hazelcast.com/v1alpha1
kind: ManagementCenter
metadata:
  name: managementcenter
spec:
  scheduling:
    tolerations:
      - key: "forbidden"
        operator: "Exists"
        effect: "NoSchedule"

For more information about tolerations and taints see the Kubernetes docs.

Topology Spread Constraints

Topology spread constraints control how pods are spread across the cluster.

The following configuration will ensure that Hazelcast pods will be spread across all the nodes evenly with at most 1 pod difference between the nodes.

  • Hazelcast

apiVersion: hazelcast.com/v1alpha1
kind: Hazelcast
metadata:
  name: hazelcast
spec:
  scheduling:
    topologySpreadConstraints:
      - maxSkew: 1
        topologyKey: kubernetes.io/hostname
        whenUnsatisfiable: corev1.DoNotSchedule
        labelSelector: 
          app.kubernetes.io/name: hazelcast
          app.kubernetes.io/instance: hazelcast
          app.kubernetes.io/managed-by: hazelcast-platform-operator
Management Center has only one instance, so it is not sensible to use topology spread constraints for the ManagementCenter Custom Resource.

For more information about topology spread constraints see the Kubernetes docs.