Large cluster performance, cost, and design trade-offs

In the previous section, we looked at live cluster upgrades and application updates. We explored various techniques and how Kubernetes supports them. We also discussed difficult problems such as breaking changes, data contract changes, data migration, and API deprecation. In this section, we will consider the various options and configurations of large clusters with different reliability and high availability properties. When you design your cluster, you need to understand your options and choose wisely based on the needs of your organization.

The topics we will cover include various availability requirements, from best effort all the way to the holy grail of zero downtime. Finally, we will settle down on the practical site-reliability engineering approach. For each category of availability, we will consider what it means from the perspectives of performance and cost.

Availability requirements

Different systems...