A Holiday Tail: The DevOps Engineer Who Saved Christmas
A Messy Christmas
It was a fortnight before Christmas, and Zest the DevOps Engineer was preparing for the traditional Christmas time traffic spikes in his Kubernetes environment. Zest runs several microservices for an online store, “Ketchup” (because it’s a cat shop), and knows that demand for their Xmas furnaments and fluffy Santa Claws dolls skyrockets during the holiday season.
The Manager Who Tried To Steal Christmas
That day, Ketchup’s Fat Cat manager came to discuss traffic surges on their site. While spikes in sales twirl his whiskers, the technical side of the shop’s management is beyond the Fat Cat’s feline sensibilities. Learning that Zest intends to practice the age-old tradition of overprovisioning K8s resources to handle these spikes, the Fat Cat was livid. Worried his profits will be nibbled away by overprovisioning, the Fat Cat demanded that Zest find another way.
To tackle this challenge, Zest decided to start from scratch. After a good scratch, he turned his focus to efficient resource management. His current scaling tools – Karpanther and Clawster Autoscaler, are useful in dynamically adjusting workloads based on usage, yet still require him to maintain a resource buffer. As long as nodes take 5 minutes to boot, he must always keep a node buffer or risk crashing during traffic spikes. ‘It’s just not possible’, growled Zest.
A Ghostly Christmas Present
Right then, a bright light shone through Zest’s window, lighting up the dimly lit room. From the window, the ghost of Saint Bernard peeked his head and tongue in. Upon hearing of his plight, the canine martyr told Zest to fear not, as he endowed him with the solution he was after. It is called, St. Bernard said – Kompass.
Zest took to the scriptures and read about the miracle of Kompass’ HiberScale technology. It is written that a sole technology titled ‘HiberScale’ will be bequeathed upon the earth to reactivate hibernated K8s nodes within just 30 seconds, thus eliminating the need to keep a node buffer – ensuring a node is always available to those who seek it.
'Twas the Spike Before Christmas
Zest effortlessly implemented the legendary HiberScale into his cluster, and soon the first holiday spike hit. Beside him, the Fat Cat paced nervously. As the usage graph spiked, Zest’s heart raced. HiberScale activated and everything was scaling up and down in an instant. It worked flawlessly, leaving even the Fat Cat silently impressed. It was a true Christmas miracle!
A Purrfect Holiday Season
As the last of the Christmas lights dimmed, Zest reviewed Ketchup’s performance. Without hefty idle resources, the store’s profits had soared. HiberScale handles every spike in demand, proving the system’s worth. Zest couldn’t help but purr with satisfaction. This season wasn’t just successful, it was the merriest yet.
Merry Christmas to everybody! May this year be filled with joy, happinnes and effective management of Kubernetes clusters!
To witness the miracle of Zesty Kompass first-hand, click here.
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