The presentation discusses running Elastic products on Kubernetes, highlighting challenges such as resource management, stateful workloads, and day-2 operations. It covers the deployment of Elasticsearch and related tools, offering insights into persistent volume options and the trade-offs between local and network-attached storage. Forward-looking statements and risks related to business conditions and product features are also mentioned, emphasizing the importance of making purchasing decisions based on current product availability.

1. 1
The best way to run
Elastic on Kubernetes
ElasticON 2020
Sebastien Guilloux
Senior Software Engineer - ECK

2. 2
This presentation and the accompanying oral presentation contain forward-looking statements, including statements
concerning plans for future offerings; the expected strength, performance or benefits of our offerings; and our future
operations and expected performance. These forward-looking statements are subject to the safe harbor provisions
under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Our expectations and beliefs in light of currently
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expand our user and customer base; our international expansion strategy; our ability to successfully execute our
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currently intend to, update any forward-looking statements or statements relating to features or functions of services
or products, except as required by law.
Forward-Looking Statements

3. Challenges
When running things on Kubernetes
• Resource management
– StatefulSets, Pods, Secrets, Services, PersistentVolumes
• Day-2 operations
– Configuration changes, version upgrades, scale up/down
• Stateful workloads
– Availability, consistency, volume management

4. ECK
Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes
Deploy
Elasticsearch, Kibana, APM Server,
Beats, Enterprise Search
On Kubernetes
Vanilla, Openshift, GKE, EKS, AKS
Simple integration
kubectl & k8s tooling
Advanced orchestration
Hot/warm/cold, dedicated masters
Smooth operations
Scale up/down, rolling upgrade, version upgrade

5. 5
Quickstart demo

6. apiVersion: elasticsearch.k8s.elastic.co/v1
kind: Elasticsearch
metadata:
name: quickstart
spec:
version: 7.9.0
nodeSets:
- name: master-nodes
count: 3
config:
node.master: true
- name: data-nodes
count: 2
config:
node.data: true
master-nodes
StatefulSet
master-nodes-1
Pod
master-nodes-0
PersistentVolume
master-nodes-1
PersistentVolume
master-nodes-2
PersistentVolume
master-nodes-0
Pod
master-nodes-2
Pod
data-nodes
StatefulSet
data-nodes-1
Pod
data-nodes-0
PersistentVolume
data-nodes-1
PersistentVolume
data-nodes-0
Pod
Behind the scenes
StatefulSets

7. PersistentVolumes
apiVersion: elasticsearch.k8s.elastic.co/v1
kind: Elasticsearch
metadata:
name: quickstart
spec:
version: 7.9.0
nodeSets:
- name: data-nodes
count: 3
config:
node.master: true
volumeClaimTemplates:
- metadata:
name: elasticsearch-data
spec:
resources:
requests:
storage: 1000Gi
storageClassName: gke-ssd
- name: master-nodes
count: 3
config:
node.data: true
Provision a 1000Gi SSD for each Pod
If the Pod is recreated (upgrade or
failure), the same volume is reattached
StorageClass

8. 8
Which storage
should I use?
Well, it depends...

9. 9
PersistentVolumes
implementations
Network-attached vs. Local

10. Network-attached PersistentVolumes
Node
Elasticsearch
Pod
Persistent
Volume
Node
• Can be (re)-attached to any host in the same
region
– Useful when re-creating a Pod on a different host
• Performance varies depending on the Cloud
provider implementation
• Examples
– gce-pd-standard, gce-pd-ssd (Google GKE
– aws-ebs-io1, aws-ebs-gp2 Amazon EKS
– azure-managed-default, azure-managed-premium
Azure AKS

11. • Bound to a single host
– Pod cannot be recreated on a different host
• Performance varies depending on the underlying hardware
• Generally not available out of the box
– Need some extra provisioning work
Local PersistentVolumes
Node
Elasticsearch
Pod
Local
volume

12. Local vs. Network-attached
Trade-offs
Availability / Performance / Cost / Operations
What NAS options does my Kubernetes provider offer?
NFS and object-storage based volumes are generally not a
good fit)
What local storage can be attached to the VMs?

13. Local vs. Network-attached
Trade-offs
Availability / Performance / Cost / Operations
Some network-attached volumes (GKE SSDs, AWS IO1) offer good
performance. Best performance can be achieved with local volumes NVME
SSDs). We observed a 0%75% improvement depending on the use case.
The use case (ingest, search, query, aggregations, etc.) matters a lot.
For example: CPU may be the bottleneck when benchmarking ingestion.
Make sure to benchmark (Rally) your use case before drawing conclusions.

14. Local vs. Network-attached
Trade-offs
Availability / Performance / Cost / Operations
Network-attached volumes: per GB-month / IOPS-month.
Local volumes: per mounted disk on the VM.

15. Local vs. Network-attached
Trade-offs
Availability / Performance / Cost / Operations
Network-attached volumes are simple to operate: a failed Pod
can be recreated immediately on a different host with the
same volume.
Local volumes are more complicated to operate.

16. 16
Local
PersistentVolumes
Operations

17. Local PersistentVolumes
Provisioning
• Static provisioning
– Pre-create PersistentVolume resources in advance: one per available disk or
partition
– Either manually (write YAML, or using the static provisioner
• Dynamic provisioning
– Automatically create the right PersistentVolume on-demand
– Volume quota is not always respected
– Requires an additional provisioner (TopoLVM, Rancher Local Path, OpenEBS)

18. Host failure
Pod status: Pending
Node
Local
volume
Remove Pod + PVC to recreate the Pod
elsewhere with a new empty volume.
Local PersistentVolumes

19. Conflicting upgrades
Local PersistentVolumes
Node
12GB
ES 8GB
Node
12GB
Local
volume
Local
volume
ES 16GB
Pending
Rolling upgrade
8GB -> 16GB
RAM
Node
32GB
Node
32GB

20. 20
Picking the right
solution

21. Picking the right solution
Decision tree
• Study available network-attached storage classes
– Performance, pricing
– Benchmark with your use case
• If not good enough, consider using local volumes
– Choose a volume provisioner (the static provisioner is a good start)
– Be aware of operational concerns

22. 22
The best way to run
Elastic on Kubernetes
ElasticON 2020
Sebastien Guilloux
Senior Software Engineer - ECK