These days, everyone and their grandma are using Kubernetes and one important aspect of Kubernetes is scaling your workloads. With KEDA, it is extremely simple to scale your workloads! Let’s have a look. repository: https://github.com/djamaile/keda-demo Introduction to KEDA Straight from the website of : KEDA KEDA is a Kubernetes-based Event Driven Autoscaler. With KEDA, you can drive the scaling of any container in Kubernetes based on the number of events needing to be processed. KEDA provides many 'triggers' on which your application can scale on. For example, Prometheus, PubSub, Postgres and many more. In this blog post we will focus on Prometheus. Starting up First, let's spin up a cluster! I am using but you are free to use minikube if you prefer that :). kind $ kind create cluster Create the namespace $ kubectl create ns keda-demo Switch to the namespace $ kubectl config set-context --current --namespace=keda-demo If the cluster is spun up, we can start deploying our Prometheus. For this, I have already written a prometheus manifest so you won’t have to do it. prometheus.yaml apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1 kind: ClusterRole metadata: name: prometheus rules: - apiGroups: [""] resources: - services verbs: ["get", "list", "watch"] - nonResourceURLs: ["/metrics"] verbs: ["get"] --- apiVersion: v1 kind: ServiceAccount metadata: name: keda-demo --- apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1 kind: ClusterRoleBinding metadata: name: prometheus roleRef: apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io kind: ClusterRole name: prometheus subjects: - kind: ServiceAccount name: keda-demo namespace: keda-demo --- apiVersion: v1 kind: ConfigMap metadata: name: prom-conf labels: name: prom-conf data: prometheus.yml: |- global: scrape_interval: 5s evaluation_interval: 5s scrape_configs: - job_name: 'go-prom-job' kubernetes_sd_configs: - role: service relabel_configs: - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_service_label_run] regex: go-prom-app-service action: keep --- apiVersion: apps/v1 kind: Deployment metadata: name: prometheus-deployment spec: replicas: 1 selector: matchLabels: app: prometheus-server template: metadata: labels: app: prometheus-server spec: serviceAccountName: keda-demo containers: - name: prometheus image: prom/prometheus args: - "--config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml" - "--storage.tsdb.path=/prometheus/" ports: - containerPort: 9090 volumeMounts: - name: prometheus-config-volume mountPath: /etc/prometheus/ - name: prometheus-storage-volume mountPath: /prometheus/ volumes: - name: prometheus-config-volume configMap: defaultMode: 420 name: prom-conf - name: prometheus-storage-volume emptyDir: {} --- apiVersion: v1 kind: Service metadata: name: prometheus-service spec: ports: - port: 9090 protocol: TCP selector: app: prometheus-server The Prometheus manifest is really simple. Just a Prometheus workload with a clusterrole and a clusterrolebinding. Don't forget to apply the manifest: $ kubectl apply -f prometheus.yaml Once the pod is up and running, let's see if it also works: $ kubectl port-forward svc/prometheus-service 9090 Now visit and you should see the user interface of Prometheus. http://localhost:9090 Deploying Keda We can now deploy the KEDA operator. KEDA provides multiple ways to deploy their operator, but for now we will use the k8s manifest. $ kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kedacore/keda/releases/download/v2.4.0/keda-2.4.0.yaml Now there should be two pods in the namespace you can check it with the following command: keda $ kubectl get pods -n keda As you can see there are two pods being spinned up: on 🤠 kind-kind (keda) Desktop/projects/keda-prometheus ☁️ default 🕙[ 07:35:40 ] ❯ kubectl get pods 335ms NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE keda-metrics-apiserver-66b8c68649-2mwf8 0/1 ContainerCreating 0 5s keda-operator-574c6d4769-q9mlc 0/1 ContainerCreating 0 5s The metrics-apiserver exposes data to the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, which gets consumed by a deployment. The operator pod activates Kubernetes deployments to scale to and from zero on no events. Creating the application (Optional) The application is a simple go application that increments the metric when you visit it. This section is optional because you are also free to use my docker image. http_requests in your folder execute the following: go mod init github.com/djamaile/keda-demo Then in your you can put in the following code: main.go package main import ( "fmt" "log" "net/http" "github.com/prometheus/client_golang/prometheus" "github.com/prometheus/client_golang/prometheus/promhttp" ) type Labels map[string]string var ( httpRequestsCounter = prometheus.NewCounter(prometheus.CounterOpts{ Name: "http_requests", Help: "number of http requests", }) ) func init() { // Metrics have to be registered to be exposed: prometheus.MustRegister(httpRequestsCounter) } func main() { http.Handle("/metrics", promhttp.Handler()) http.HandleFunc("/", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) { defer httpRequestsCounter.Inc() fmt.Fprintf(w, "Hello, you've requested: %s\n", r.URL.Path) }) log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)) } Now build the go application with: $ go mod tidy Let's then make a simple for it: Dockerfile FROM golang as build-stage COPY go.mod / COPY go.sum / COPY main.go / RUN cd / && CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux go build -a -installsuffix cgo -o go-prom-app FROM alpine COPY --from=build-stage /go-prom-app / EXPOSE 8080 CMD ["/go-prom-app"] Only thing left is to build and push the image: $ docker build -t <your_username>/keda . $ docker push <your_username>/keda Running the application If you don’t have a Docker account or don’t want to use it, that’s fine. You can use my docker image! Let’s get our go application running in the cluster, for that we need some k8s manifests. Not to worry because I already wrote them: go-deployment.yaml apiVersion: apps/v1 kind: Deployment metadata: name: go-prom-app namespace: keda-demo spec: selector: matchLabels: app: go-prom-app template: metadata: labels: app: go-prom-app spec: containers: - name: go-prom-app image: djam97/keda imagePullPolicy: Always ports: - containerPort: 8080 --- apiVersion: v1 kind: Service metadata: name: go-prom-app-service namespace: keda-demo labels: run: go-prom-app-service spec: ports: - port: 8080 protocol: TCP selector: app: go-prom-app You can replace the image name with your own image if you prefer that. Let's apply the manifest: $ kubectl apply -f go-deployment.yaml If the pod is up verify if it is working $ kubectl port-forward svc/go-prom-app-service 8080 If you visit you should see . http://localhost:8080 Hello, you've requested: / Scaling the application Now that we have our go application up we can write a manifest that will scale our application. Keda offers many triggers that can scale our application, but of course, we will use the . Prometheus trigger In a new file called scaled-object.yaml add the following content: apiVersion: keda.sh/v1alpha1 # Custom CRD provisioned by the Keda operator kind: ScaledObject metadata: name: prometheus-scaledobject spec: scaleTargetRef: # target our deployment name: go-prom-app # Interval to when to query Prometheus pollingInterval: 15 # The period to wait after the last trigger reported active # before scaling the deployment back to 1 cooldownPeriod: 30 # min replicas keda will scale to # if you have an app that has an dependency on pubsub # this would be a good use case to set it to zero # why keep your app running if your topic has no messages? minReplicaCount: 1 # max replicas keda will scale to maxReplicaCount: 20 advanced: # HPA config # Read about it here: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/run-application/horizontal-pod-autoscale/ horizontalPodAutoscalerConfig: behavior: scaleDown: stabilizationWindowSeconds: 30 policies: - type: Percent value: 50 periodSeconds: 30 scaleUp: stabilizationWindowSeconds: 0 policies: - type: Percent value: 50 periodSeconds: 10 triggers: - type: prometheus metadata: # address where keda can reach our prometheus on serverAddress: http://prometheus-service.keda-demo.svc.cluster.local:9090 # metric on what we want to scale metricName: http_requests_total # if treshold is reached then Keda will scale our deployment threshold: "100" query: sum(rate(http_requests[1m])) Read the yaml manifest and its comments to understand what is going on. One important note as well is in you can see I have specified 50%, that means our pod will scale up with 50% of it’s current amount of pods. it will stop at 20 pods because that is the limit we specified. advanced.horizontalPodAutoscalerConfig.scaleUp.policies 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 5 -> 8 -> 12 -> 18 -> 20 Let's apply the manifest: $ kubectl apply -f scaled-object.yaml This will provision an HPA in your namespace which you can check with: $ kubectl get hpa but because this is a custom CRD you can also query the custom CRD with kubectl: $ kubectl get scaledobject.keda.sh/prometheus-scaledobject You should see that the is ready so let’s scale our application! Remember our application scales on the metric and our threshold is only 100 so we should be able reach that threshold. For this we can use a simple tool called . prometheus-scaledobject http_requests_total hey Run the application $ kubectl port-forward svc/go-prom-app-service 8080 In another terminal watch the pods $ kubectl get pods -w -n keda-demo Put load on the application (Do this continuously, until there are 20 pods) $ hey -n 10000 -m GET http://localhost:8080 It can take a minute before the application actually starts scaling. After a while you should have 20 pods up and running! Now let’s also look at the scale down process. Stop putting load on the application and let’s just watch the pods. This process should go from . This is basically how KEDA goes to work! 20 -> 10 -> 5 - > 2 -> 1 If you like KEDA please check out their docs for more examples and what type of different triggers they provide. Happy auto-scaling!