lxd and constraints

Merlijn Sebrechts merlijn.sebrechts at gmail.com
Mon Jan 16 17:31:16 UTC 2017


+1

2017-01-16 18:28 GMT+01:00 Aaron Bentley <aaron.bentley at canonical.com>:

> ISTM that
>  - constraints are used to ensure that a workload runs well.  Minimum
>    constraints serve this, and maximum constraints do not.  (Maximum
>    constraints may be useful to ensure that a workload does not swamp
>    processes outside its container.)
>
>  - Juju cannot enforce a minimum constraint.  LXD could potentially add
>    support for this, and then Juju would be able to leverage it.
>
>  - Given that Juju cannot enforce a minimum constraint on LXD at this
>    time, it would make sense to emit a warning that it is ignoring the
>    constraint.  This would retain the portability of bundles that use
>    constraints while keeping the user informed.
>
> On 2017-01-13 01:14 PM, Nate Finch wrote:
> > I just feel like we're entering a minefield that our application and CLI
> > aren't really built to handle.  I think we *should* handle it, but it
> > needs to be well planned out, instead of just doing a tiny piece at a
> > time and only figuring out later if we did the right thing.
> >
> > There's a few problems I can see:
> >
> > 1.) you can have 10 lxd containers with memory limit of 2GB on a machine
> > with 4GB of RAM.  Deploying 10 applications to those containers that
> > each have a constraint of mem=2GB will not work as you expect.  We could
> > add extra bookkeeping for this, and warn you that you appear to be
> > oversubscribing the host, but that's more work.
> >
> > 2.) What happens if you try to deploy a container without a memory limit
> > on a host that already has a container on it?
> >
> > For example:
> > 4GB host
> > 2GB lxd container
> > try to deploy a new service in a container on this machine.
> > Do we warn?  We have no clue how much RAM the service will use.  Maybe
> > it'll be fine, maybe it won't.
> >
> > 3.) Our CLI doesn't really work well with constraints on containers:
> >
> > juju deploy mysql --constraints mem=2G --to lxd
> >
> > Does this deploy a machine with 2GB of ram and a container with a 2GB
> > ram limit on it?  Or does it deploy a machine with 2GB of ram and a
> > container with no limit on it?  It has to be one or the other, and
> > currently we have no way of indicating which we want to do, and no way
> > to do the other one without using multiple commands.
> >
> > This is a more likely use case, creating a bigger machine that can hold
> > multiple containers:
> > juju add-machine --constraints mem=4GB
> > // adds machine, let's say 5
> > // create a container on machine 5 with 2GB memory limit
> > juju deploy mysql --constraints mem=2GB --to lxd:5
> >
> > At least in this case, the deploy command is clear, there's only one
> > thing they can possibly mean.  Usually, the placement directive would
> > override the constraint, but in this case, it does what you would
> > want... but it is a littler weird that --to lxd:5 uses the constraint,
> > but --to 5 ignores it.
> >
> > Note that you can't just write a simple script to do the above, because
> > the machine number is variable, so you have to parse our output and then
> > use that for the next command.  It's still scriptable, obviously, but
> > it's more complicated script than just two lines of bash.
> >
> > Also note that using this second method, you can't deploy more than one
> > unit at a time, unless you want multiple units on containers on the same
> > machine (which I think would be pretty odd).
> >
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 3:48 AM Rick Harding <rick.harding at canonical.com
> > <mailto:rick.harding at canonical.com>> wrote:
> >
> >     In the end, you say you want an instance with 2gb of ram and if the
> >     cloud has an instance with that exact limit it is in fact an exact
> >     limit. The key things here is the clouds don't have infinite
> >     malleable instance types like containers (this works for kvm and for
> >     lxd). So I'm not sure the mis-match is as far apart as it seems.
> >     root disk means give me a disk this big, if you ask for 2 core as
> >     long as you can match an instance type with 2 cores it's exactly the
> >     max you get.
> >
> >     It seems part of this can be more adjusting the language from
> >     "minimum" to something closer to "requested X" where request gives
> >     it more of a "I want X" without the min/max boundaries.
> >
> >
> >
> >     On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 3:14 AM John Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com
> >     <mailto:john at arbash-meinel.com>> wrote:
> >
> >         So we could make it so that constraints are actually 'exactly'
> >         for LXD, which would then conform to both minimum and maximum,
> >         and would still be actually useful for people deploying to
> >         containers. We could certainly probe the host machine and say
> >         "you asked for 48 cores, and the host machine doesn't have it".
> >
> >         However, note that explicit placement also takes precedence over
> >         constraints anyway. If you do:
> >           juju deploy mysql --constraints mem=4G
> >         today, and then do:
> >          juju add-unit --to 2
> >         We don't apply the constraint limitations to that specific unit.
> >         Arguably we should at *least* be warning that the constraints
> >         for the overall application don't appear to be valid for this
> >         instance.
> >
> >         I guess I'd rather see constraints still set limits for
> >         containers, because people really want that functionality, and
> >         that we warn any time you do a direct placement and the
> >         constraints aren't satisfied. (but warn isn't failing the
> attempt)
> >
> >         John
> >         =:->
> >
> >         On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 10:09 AM, Stuart Bishop
> >         <stuart.bishop at canonical.com
> >         <mailto:stuart.bishop at canonical.com>> wrote:
> >
> >             On 13 January 2017 at 02:20, Nate Finch
> >             <nate.finch at canonical.com <mailto:nate.finch at canonical.com>>
> >             wrote:
> >
> >                 I'm implementing constraints for lxd containers and
> >                 provider... and stumbled on an impedance mismatch that I
> >                 don't know how to handle.
> >
> >
> >
> >                 I'm not really sure how to resolve this problem.  Maybe
> >                 it's not a problem.  Maybe constraints just have a
> >                 different meaning for containers?  You have to specify
> >                 the machine number you're deploying to for any
> >                 deployment past the first anyway, so you're already
> >                 manually choosing the machine, at which point,
> >                 constraints don't really make sense anyway.
> >
> >
> >             I don't think Juju can handle this. Either constraints have
> >             different meanings with different cloud providers, or lxd
> >             needs to accept minimum constraints (along with any other
> >             cloud providers with this behavior).
> >
> >             If you decide constraints need to consistently mean minimum,
> >             then I'd argue it is best to not pass them to current-gen
> >             lxd at all. Enforcing that containers are restricted to the
> >             minimum viable resources declared in a bundle does not seem
> >             helpful, and Juju does not have enough information to choose
> >             suitable maximums (and if it did, would not know if they
> >             would remain suitable tomorrow).
> >
> >             --
> >             Stuart Bishop <stuart.bishop at canonical.com
> >             <mailto:stuart.bishop at canonical.com>>
> >
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