Skip to main content

Autoscaling CoreDNS

CoreDNS is the default DNS service for Kubernetes that runs in Pods with the label k8s-app=kube-dns. In this lab exercise, we'll autoscale CoreDNS based on the number of schedulable nodes and cores of our cluster. Cluster Proportional Autoscaler will resize the number of CoreDNS replicas.

Currently we're running a 3 node cluster:

~$kubectl get nodes
NAME                                            STATUS   ROLES    AGE   VERSION
ip-10-42-109-155.us-east-2.compute.internal   Ready    <none>   76m   v1.29-eks-48e63af
ip-10-42-142-113.us-east-2.compute.internal   Ready    <none>   76m   v1.29-eks-48e63af
ip-10-42-80-39.us-east-2.compute.internal     Ready    <none>   76m   v1.29-eks-48e63af
Based on autoscaling parameters defined in the ConfigMap, we see cluster proportional autoscaler scale CoreDNS to 2 replicas:
~$kubectl get po -n kube-system -l k8s-app=kube-dns
NAME                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
coredns-5db97b446d-5zwws   1/1     Running   0          66s
coredns-5db97b446d-n5mp4   1/1     Running   0          89m
If we increased the size of the EKS cluster to 5 nodes, Cluster Proportional Autoscaler will scale up the number of replicas of CoreDNS to accommodate for it:
~$aws eks update-nodegroup-config --cluster-name $EKS_CLUSTER_NAME \
  --nodegroup-name $EKS_DEFAULT_MNG_NAME --scaling-config desiredSize=$(($EKS_DEFAULT_MNG_DESIRED+2))
~$aws eks wait nodegroup-active --cluster-name $EKS_CLUSTER_NAME \
  --nodegroup-name $EKS_DEFAULT_MNG_NAME
~$kubectl wait --for=condition=Ready nodes --all --timeout=120s
Kubernetes now shows the 5 nodes in a Ready state:
~$kubectl get nodes
NAME                                          STATUS   ROLES    AGE   VERSION
ip-10-42-10-248.us-west-2.compute.internal    Ready    <none>   61s   v1.29-eks-48e63af
ip-10-42-10-29.us-west-2.compute.internal     Ready    <none>   124m  v1.29-eks-48e63af
ip-10-42-11-109.us-west-2.compute.internal    Ready    <none>   6m39s v1.29-eks-48e63af
ip-10-42-11-152.us-west-2.compute.internal    Ready    <none>   61s   v1.29-eks-48e63af
ip-10-42-12-139.us-west-2.compute.internal    Ready    <none>   6m20s v1.29-eks-48e63af
And we can see that the number of CoreDNS Pods has increased:
~$kubectl get po -n kube-system -l k8s-app=kube-dns
NAME                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
coredns-657694c6f4-klj6w   1/1     Running   0          14h
coredns-657694c6f4-tdzsd   1/1     Running   0          54s
coredns-657694c6f4-wmnnc   1/1     Running   0          14h
You can take a look at the CPA logs to see how it responded to the change in the number of nodes in our cluster:
~$kubectl logs deploy/dns-autoscaler -n other
{"includeUnschedulableNodes":true,"max":6,"min":2,"nodesPerReplica":2,"preventSinglePointFailure":true}
I0801 15:02:45.330307       1 k8sclient.go:272] Cluster status: SchedulableNodes[1], SchedulableCores[2]
I0801 15:02:45.330328       1 k8sclient.go:273] Replicas are not as expected : updating replicas from 2 to 3