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Kube-Green: Shuts down Your K8s (few)Resources When not in use

motoskia
Kube-Green

We have seen about how to deploy any application and scale etc, to improve our organization productivity, but have we thought about sustainability or environment causes when we deploy any applications? As if there is n number of pods, how much energy, resource and money it consumes? You may understand this on our latest article about Optimizing Microservice architecture for sustainability. Let’s leave about Production, how much we are utilizing in non-production environment? Non-production is always more then production, this is true. Also, this emits how much CO2? This would be big worry in the future. Before it is big, you can calculate How many CO2 produced by the pod. How we can fix this? Well, there is a tool called Kube-green. Which helps to shutdown the pods automatically when there is no use. Let’s see in-detail about the kube-green in this post.

What is Kube-Green?

As we mentioned managing resource utilization is essential to contain the costs and limit energy consumption. But we have most of the tools to manage the nodes, but how many solutions we have for taking care the pods? Well, kube-green which is nothing but a Kubernetes operator that allows to shut down environments or specific resources in order to optimize resource utilization, limiting energy waste.

But how does Kube-green succeed in managing correctly Kubernetes resources to limit energy waste?

Sounds good? Yes, with Kube-green you can limit the up-time of resources and environments that are not needed for 24/7, like development, staging or test environment.

How it works?

The kube-green project works by deploying a controller and implementing a new CRD called SleepInfo. The SleepInfo resource describes what time and days to “sleep” and “wake up” Deployments. Then the controller takes that configuration and patches the targeted Deployments to set the replicas to 0 when sleeping. Then returns the replicas value to its original state when waking up.

apiVersion: kube-green.com/v1alpha1
kind: SleepInfo
metadata:
  name: working-hours
spec:
  weekdays: "1-5"
  sleepAt: "20:00"
  wakeUpAt: "08:00"
  timeZone: "Europe/Rome"
  suspendCronJobs: true
  excludeRef:
    - apiVersion: "apps/v1"
      kind:       Deployment
      name:       my-deployment

With this SleepInfo, called working-hours, namespace will be slept at 20:00 and woken up at 08:00 (Italy time zone) on weekdays (Monday to Friday).

The SleepInfo spec contains:

For now, it manages,

By default, on sleep, deployment resources are stopped (if not excluded). If you want to suspend also cronjobs, set suspendCronJobs to true.

For more example: https://kube-green.dev/docs/configuration/

Install

Prerequisite

kube-green support all Kubernetes cluster versions >= 1.19 <= 1.24 and OpenShift Container Platform v4.

Supported architectures are: amd64, arm64.

To successfully install kube-green, in the cluster must be installed a cert-manager. If it is not already installed installed, click here.

Kubectl

With this method, you can not change the default configuration parameters. The default static configuration for the latest release can be installed with:

# kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kube-green/kube-green/releases/latest/download/kube-green.yaml

If you want to install a specific release version, run:

# kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kube-green/kube-green/releases/download/${RELEASE_TAG}/kube-green.yaml

with ${RELEASE_TAG} correctly filled.

For more installation steps, please check Kube-green installation.

Utilize kube-green in your project​

You can deploy kube-green resources (SleepInfo CRDs’) with two different scopes in your project:

Deploy in every Environment​

‘deploying in every Environment‘ means that the resources that you have created to manage kube-green will be deployed singularly in every Environment/Namespace of your project. To achieve this result, you need to identify if your project template uses default Kubernetes resource or Kustomize structure, and then save the resources in the correct path.

Deploy in a specific Environment​

When deploying kube-green configurations in a specific environment, the resource-managing features of kube-green will be applied only to the Deployments and CronJobs running in that environment.

Depending which template, you are using:

Where environmentId is a variable identified with the parameter envId configured on the console.

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