This is the season. With Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holiday season rapidly approaching, it’s the time of year when DevOps and SRE teams are on full alert. And, your main focus is to ensure your applications can withstand the increased load that comes with this wonderfully busy time of the year.
The stakes couldn’t be any higher. Many retail and commerce organizations are expected to do 30% or more of their yearly revenue between Black Friday and the end of the year. Any downtime to mission-critical applications during this period could have devastating effects on a company's bottom line.
Events like Black Friday, where applications can experience a high influx of load, are a major reason why companies have started adopting solutions like Kubernetes at a rapid pace. The auto-scaling capabilities of Kubernetes, mixed with the ability to over-provision resources, can help you ensure your application infrastructure has the capacity needed to meet even the largest spikes in demand.
But, can you trust these measures to ensure availability and resilience during Black Friday?
Our research says no, you can’t trust your existing auto-scaling and over-provisioning. PerfectScale has been implemented in hundreds of Kubernetes clusters across various different customers, and what we’ve found is that many clusters are over-provisioned quite significantly. And, when we say significantly, we’re seeing provisioning 2-3x larger than it needs to be to support the typical load for the environment.
"30% of all services running in a cluster are lacking the resources needed to stay available and performant"
Despite the presence of free, unallocated resources, we’re also seeing 30% of all services running in a cluster are lacking the resources needed to stay available and performant during peak usage periods.
This is due to services being mistakenly capped by the amount they are able to consume, which makes them susceptible to out-of-memory issues, CPU throttling and even evictions. These issues are difficult to diagnose the root cause, leading to extended periods of system latency or downtime until these issues are resolved.
With scalable infrastructure, like Kubernetes, more than cluster-level over-provisioning is needed to ensure peak performance and availability. Companies need to completely and continuously re-appraise the resources and capacity across all services to ensure they will meet the demand during high-traffic times like Black Friday.
However, with large-scale, distributed Kubernetes environments, this continuous re-appraisal means time-consuming and manual tasks in efforts to right-size your clusters. With Black Friday quickly approaching, many teams simply do not have the time and resources to dedicate to activities like this. And if they do, they will still be missing the insights needed to quickly react to the dynamic changes that come with the seasonal load spikes during this time of the year.
This means even the most efficiently run Kubernetes environments are susceptible to performance risks that can impact customer experiences and revenue streams during Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the holiday season.
How to avoid unexpected Kubenetes capacity issues during Black Friday, at scale?
PerfectScale is a critical part of your tool kit when it comes to avoiding performance issues that can impact your revenue streams this Black Friday. Our solution continually evaluates the usage, performance and cost of your Kubernetes environment, providing actionable intelligence that allows you to dynamically scale your capacity to meet the demand of the holidays.
Our solution can be installed in minutes and immediately provides insights that allow you to quickly address end-user-impacting performance risks. PerfectScale enables you to:
- Proactively improve Kubernetes resilience and availability by pinpointing services that are misconfigured or under-provisioned
- Instantly troubleshoot issues and restore services if latency or outages happen
- Gain complete cost visibility to eliminate unnecessary waste that can grow exponentially during seasonal load spikes
In our efforts to help as many companies as possible avoid performance issues and outages during the holiday season, we are offering our solution free for the remainder of the year. Start a trial today to see PerfectScale in action!
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