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What is freeze-proxy

A knative add-on that uses cgroups to pause/unpause containers when request count drops to zero.

Status: PoC - not for production (yet). But fun/interesting!

In the demo below, a background goroutine tries to print every 500ms. Normally it would run constantly, even when no requests are in-flight. With freeze-proxy enabled, once request count drops to zero the background goroutine is paused. When a new request comes in the container is quickly unpaused and the background activity resumes normally.

screencast of freeze-proxy

Install

  1. Ensure your Kubernetes is using containerd as the container runtime.
    • e.g. for minikube, add --container-runtime containerd to minikube start command: minikube start --container-runtime=containerd
    • Support for other container runtimes should be possible, eventually.
  2. Install knative as normal. Note: for local development, you will need to use an external container registry, i.e. Docker Hub, GCR, etc.
  3. Add a label to your nodes with the appropriate runtime.
    • e.g. for minikube and containerd, run kubectl label nodes minikube knative.dev/container-runtime=containerd
  4. Install the Freeze-Prozy components: ko apply -f config/
  5. That's it - deploy your knative service as normal!

Why?

This is an experiment in enabling a lambda/openwhisk-style UX where containers are paused between requests. This allows you to keep "warm" containers around than can be quickly unpaused when load comes in, without needing to worry about people using that background capacity without paying for it. Particularly useful in combination with the scale-down-delay parameter to keep containers around for (e.g.) 15 minutes after the request count drops, avoiding a cold start penalty in this case.

tl;dr: if you're charging by request count/length, this stops apps using cpu resources when not processing a request. Used in combination with more generous scale down times, you can avoid cold start penalties for many workloads.

How?

freeze-proxy runs a mutating admission controller that modifies knative pods to introduce a small proxy server -- the freeze proxy -- between the queue proxy and the user container. If request count falls to zero the freeze proxy talks to a daemonset on the host (using a projected service token to validate the pod uid so pods can't maliciously pause/resume other containers on the same node) to pause the container. When a new request comes in, the user's container is resumed in the same way, and the proxy forwards the request over.

Example App

The "sleeptalker" app (which can be deployed via ko apply -f config/example.yaml) runs a background goroutine that prints a message every couple of seconds while it is running. If you deploy it normally and watch the logs you'll see it printing constantly. If you deploy it after installing freeze-proxy you'll see it only manages to print while the server is servicing http requests.

Limitations / Future Work

Known limitations (there may be more, this is a PoC!) / Future Work:

  • Only works with containerd and docker right now, though support for cri-o shouldn't be impossibly hard.
  • Mounts the containerd socket in to the freeze container, which requires root to access, which means the freeze-proxy sidecar runs as root. This could (and should) be avoided by using an intermediate DaemonSet, though.
  • Mounts the containerd socket in to the freeze container, which requires allowing hostPath volume mounts. User containers can't use this to do anything nasty since knative doesn't permit it, but this stops you having as secure a PSP as would be ideal.
  • Doesn't work with knative's multi-container feature flag yet (though it should probably work fine eventually).
  • Pauses immediately when request count hits zero, might be nice to wait a few milliseconds in case another request comes in to save the small overhead of the pause/unpause in this case.
  • Todo: support user-chosen userContainer ports, names
  • It would be nice to merge the freeze proxy in to the queue proxy to avoid the extra hop and the mutating admission controller stuff.
  • Rather than using freeze/resume, might be nicer to just dramatically lower cpu quota. This may play nicer with language runtimes etc that don't expect time to come to a complete stop.