Placement

API-CHANGE NOTE:

The Placement and PlacementDecision API v1alpha1 version will no longer be served in OCM v0.9.0.

• Migrate manifests and API clients to use the Placement and PlacementDecision API v1beta1 version, available since OCM v0.7.0.
• All existing persisted objects are accessible via the new API.
• Notable changes:
  • The field spec.prioritizerPolicy.configurations.name in Placement API v1alpha1 is removed and replaced by spec.prioritizerPolicy.configurations.scoreCoordinate.builtIn in v1beta1.

Overall

Placement concept is used to dynamically select a set of managedClusters in one or multiple ManagedClusterSet so that higher level users can either replicate Kubernetes resources to the member clusters or run their advanced workload i.e. multi-cluster scheduling.

The “input” and “output” of the scheduling process are decoupled into two separated Kubernetes API Placement and PlacementDecision. As is shown in the following picture, we prescribe the scheduling policy in the spec of Placement API and the placement controller in the hub will help us to dynamically select a slice of managed clusters from the given cluster sets. The selected clusters will be listed in PlacementDecision.

Following the architecture of Kubernetes’ original scheduling framework, the multi-cluster scheduling is logically divided into two phases internally:

• Predicate: Hard requirements for the selected clusters.
• Prioritize: Rank the clusters by the soft requirements and select a subset among them.

Select clusters in ManagedClusterSet

By following the previous section about ManagedClusterSet, now we’re supposed to have one or multiple valid cluster sets in the hub clusters. Then we can move on and create a placement in the “workspace namespace” by specifying predicates and prioritizers in the Placement API to define our own multi-cluster scheduling policy.

Predicates

Label/Claim selection

In the predicates section, you can select clusters by labels or clusterClaims. For instance, you can select 3 clusters with label purpose=test and clusterClaim platform.open-cluster-management.io=aws as seen in the following examples:

apiVersion: cluster.open-cluster-management.io/v1beta1
kind: Placement
metadata:
  name: placement1
  namespace: default
spec:
  numberOfClusters: 3
  clusterSets:
    - prod
  predicates:
    - requiredClusterSelector:
        labelSelector:
          matchLabels:
            purpose: test
        claimSelector:
          matchExpressions:
            - key: platform.open-cluster-management.io
              operator: In
              values:
                - aws

Note that the distinction between label-selecting and claim-selecting is elaborated in this page about how to extend attributes for the managed clusters.

Taints/Tolerations

To support filtering unhealthy/not-reporting clusters and keep workloads from being placed in unhealthy or unreachable clusters, we introduce the similar concept of taint/toleration in Kubernetes. It also allows user to add a customized taint to deselect a cluster from placement. This is useful when the user wants to set a cluster to maintenance mode and evict workload from this cluster.

In OCM, Taints and Tolerations work together to allow users to control the selection of managed clusters more flexibly.

Taints are properties of ManagedClusters, they allow a Placement to repel a set of ManagedClusters in predicates stage.

Tolerations are applied to Placements, and allow Placements to select ManagedClusters with matching taints.

The following example shows how to tolerate clusters with taints.

• Tolerate clusters with taint

  Suppose your managed cluster has taint added as below.

  apiVersion: cluster.open-cluster-management.io/v1
  kind: ManagedCluster
  metadata:
    name: cluster1
  spec:
    hubAcceptsClient: true
    taints:
      - effect: NoSelect
        key: gpu
        value: "true"
        timeAdded: '2022-02-21T08:11:06Z'
  

  By default, the placement won’t select this cluster unless you define tolerations.

  apiVersion: cluster.open-cluster-management.io/v1beta1
  kind: Placement
  metadata:
    name: placement1
    namespace: ns1
  spec:
    tolerations:
      - key: gpu
        value: "true"
        operator: Equal
  

  With the above tolerations defined, cluster1 could be selected by placement because of the key: gpu and value: "true" match.

• Tolerate clusters with taint for a period of time

  TolerationSeconds represents the period of time the toleration tolerates the taint. It could be used for the case like, when a managed cluster gets offline, users can make applications deployed on this cluster to be transferred to another available managed cluster after a tolerated time.

  apiVersion: cluster.open-cluster-management.io/v1
  kind: ManagedCluster
  metadata:
    name: cluster1
  spec:
    hubAcceptsClient: true
    taints:
      - effect: NoSelect
        key: cluster.open-cluster-management.io/unreachable
        timeAdded: '2022-02-21T08:11:06Z'
  

  If define a placement with TolerationSeconds as below, then the workload will be transferred to another available managed cluster after 5 minutes.

  apiVersion: cluster.open-cluster-management.io/v1alpha1
  kind: Placement
  metadata:
    name: placement1
    namespace: ns1
  spec:
    tolerations:
      - key: cluster.open-cluster-management.io/unreachable
        operator: Exists
        tolerationSeconds: 300
  

In tolerations section, it includes the following fields:

• Key (optional). Key is the taint key that the toleration applies to.
• Value (optional). Value is the taint value the toleration matches to.
• Operator (optional). Operator represents a key’s relationship to the value. Valid operators are Exists and Equal. Defaults to Equal. A toleration “matches” a taint if the keys are the same and the effects are the same, and the operator is:
  • Equal. The operator is Equal and the values are equal.
  • Exists. Exists is equivalent to wildcard for value, so that a placement can tolerate all taints of a particular category.
• Effect (optional). Effect indicates the taint effect to match. Empty means match all taint effects. When specified, allowed values are NoSelect, PreferNoSelect and NoSelectIfNew. (PreferNoSelect is not implemented yet, currently clusters with effect PreferNoSelect will always be selected.)
• TolerationSeconds (optional). TolerationSeconds represents the period of time the toleration (which must be of effect NoSelect/PreferNoSelect, otherwise this field is ignored) tolerates the taint. The default value is nil, which indicates it tolerates the taint forever. The start time of counting the TolerationSeconds should be the TimeAdded in Taint, not the cluster scheduled time or TolerationSeconds added time.

Prioritizers

Score-based prioritizer

In prioritizerPolicy section, you can define the policy of prioritizers.

The following example shows how to select clusters with prioritizers.

• Select a cluster with the largest allocatable memory.

  apiVersion: cluster.open-cluster-management.io/v1beta1
  kind: Placement
  metadata:
    name: placement1
    namespace: ns1
  spec:
    numberOfClusters: 1
    prioritizerPolicy:
      configurations:
        - scoreCoordinate:
            builtIn: ResourceAllocatableMemory
  

  The prioritizer policy has default mode additive and default prioritizers Steady and Balance.

  In the above example, the prioritizers actually come into effect are Steady, Balance and ResourceAllocatableMemory.

  And the end of this section has more description about the prioritizer policy mode and default prioritizers.

• Select a cluster with the largest allocatable CPU and memory, and make placement sensitive to resource changes.

  apiVersion: cluster.open-cluster-management.io/v1beta1
  kind: Placement
  metadata:
    name: placement1
    namespace: ns1
  spec:
    numberOfClusters: 1
    prioritizerPolicy:
      configurations:
        - scoreCoordinate:
            builtIn: ResourceAllocatableCPU
          weight: 2
        - scoreCoordinate:
            builtIn: ResourceAllocatableMemory
          weight: 2
  

  The prioritizer policy has default mode additive and default prioritizers Steady and Balance, and their default weight is 1.

  In the above example, the prioritizers actually come into effect are Steady with weight 1, Balance with weight 1, ResourceAllocatableCPU with weight 2 and ResourceAllocatableMemory with weight 2. The cluster score will be a combination of the 4 prioritizers score. Since ResourceAllocatableCPU and ResourceAllocatableMemory have higher weight, they will be weighted more in the results, and make placement sensitive to resource changes.

  And the end of this section has more description about the prioritizer weight and how the final score is calculated.

• Select two clusters with the largest addon score CPU ratio, and pin the placement decisions.

  apiVersion: cluster.open-cluster-management.io/v1beta1
  kind: Placement
  metadata:
    name: placement1
    namespace: ns1
  spec:
    numberOfClusters: 2
    prioritizerPolicy:
      mode: Exact
      configurations:
        - scoreCoordinate:
            builtIn: Steady
          weight: 3
        - scoreCoordinate:
            type: AddOn
            addOn:
              resourceName: default
              scoreName: cpuratio
  

  In the above example, explicitly define the mode as exact. The prioritizers actually come into effect are Steady with weight 3 and addon score cpuratio with weight 1. Go into the Extensible scheduling section to learn more about addon score.

In prioritizerPolicy section, it includes the following fields:

• mode is either Exact, Additive or "", where "" is Additive by default.
  • In Additive mode, any prioritizer not explicitly enumerated is enabled in its default Configurations, in which Steady and Balance prioritizers have the weight of 1 while other prioritizers have the weight of 0. Additive doesn’t require configuring all prioritizers. The default Configurations may change in the future, and additional prioritization will happen.
  • In Exact mode, any prioritizer not explicitly enumerated is weighted as zero. Exact requires knowing the full set of prioritizers you want, but avoids behavior changes between releases.
• configurations represents the configuration of prioritizers.
  • scoreCoordinate represents the configuration of the prioritizer and score source.
    • type defines the type of the prioritizer score. Type is either BuiltIn, AddOn or “", where "” is BuiltIn by default. When the type is BuiltIn, a BuiltIn prioritizer name must be specified. When the type is AddOn, need to configure the score source in AddOn.
      • builtIn defines the name of a BuiltIn prioritizer. Below are the valid BuiltIn prioritizer names.
        • Balance: balance the decisions among the clusters.
        • Steady: ensure the existing decision is stabilized.
        • ResourceAllocatableCPU: sort clusters based on the allocatable CPU.
        • ResourceAllocatableMemory: sort clusters based on the allocatable memory.
      • addOn defines the resource name and score name. AddOnPlacementScore is introduced to describe addon scores, go into the Extensible scheduling section to learn more about it.
        • resourceName defines the resource name of the AddOnPlacementScore. The placement prioritizer selects AddOnPlacementScore CR by this name.
        • scoreName defines the score name inside AddOnPlacementScore. AddOnPlacementScore contains a list of score name and score value, scoreName specifies the score to be used by the prioritizer.
  • weight defines the weight of the prioritizer. The value must be ranged in [-10,10]. Each prioritizer will calculate an integer score of a cluster in the range of [-100, 100]. The final score of a cluster will be sum(weight * prioritizer_score). A higher weight indicates that the prioritizer weights more in the cluster selection, while 0 weight indicates that the prioritizer is disabled. A negative weight indicates wanting to select the last ones.

Extensible scheduling

In placement resource based scheduling, in some cases the prioritizer needs extra data (more than the default value provided by ManagedCluster) to calculate the score of the managed cluster. For example, schedule the clusters based on cpu or memory usage data of the clusters fetched from a monitoring system.

So we provide a new API AddOnPlacementScore to support a more extensible way to schedule based on customized scores.

• As a user, as mentioned in the above section, can specify the score in placement yaml to select clusters.
• As a score provider, a 3rd party controller could run on either hub or managed cluster, to maintain the lifecycle of AddOnPlacementScore and update score into it.

Extend the multi-cluster scheduling capabilities with placement introduces how to implement a customized score provider.

Refer to the enhancements to learn more.

PlacementDecisions

A slice of PlacementDecision will be created by placement controller in the same namespace, each with a label of cluster.open-cluster-management.io/placement={placement name}. PlacementDecision contains the results of the cluster selection as seen in the following examples.

apiVersion: cluster.open-cluster-management.io/v1beta1
kind: PlacementDecision
metadata:
  labels:
    cluster.open-cluster-management.io/placement: placement1
  name: placement1-decision-1
  namespace: default
status:
  decisions:
    - clusterName: cluster1
    - clusterName: cluster2
    - clusterName: cluster3

The status.decisions lists the top N clusters with the highest score and ordered by names. The status.decisions changes over time, the scheduling result update based on what endpoints exist.

The scheduling result in the PlacementDecision API is designed to be paginated with its page index as the name’s suffix to avoid “too large object” issue from the underlying Kubernetes API framework.

PlacementDecision can be consumed by another operand to decide how the workload should be placed in multiple clusters.

Decision strategy

The decisionStrategy section of Placement can be used to divide the created PlacementDecision into groups and define the number of clusters per decision group.

Assume an environment has 310 clusters, 10 of which have the label prod-canary-west and 10 have the label prod-canary-east. The following example demonstrates how to group the clusters with the labels prod-canary-west and prod-canary-east into 2 groups, and group the remaining clusters into groups with a maximum of 150 clusters each.

apiVersion: cluster.open-cluster-management.io/v1beta1
kind: Placement
metadata:
  name: placement1
  namespace: default
spec:
  clusterSets:
    - global
  decisionStrategy:
    groupStrategy:
      clustersPerDecisionGroup: 150
      decisionGroups:
      - groupName: prod-canary-west
        groupClusterSelector:
          labelSelector:
            matchExpressions:
              - key: prod-canary-west
                operator: Exists
      - groupName: prod-canary-east
        groupClusterSelector:
          labelSelector:
            matchExpressions:
              - key: prod-canary-east
                operator: Exists

The decisionStrategy section includes the following fields:

• decisionGroups: Represents a list of predefined groups to put decision results. Decision groups will be constructed based on the decisionGroups field at first. The clusters not included in the decisionGroups will be divided to other decision groups afterwards. Each decision group should not have the number of clusters larger than the clustersPerDecisionGroup.
  • groupName: Represents the name to be added as the value of label key cluster.open-cluster-management.io/decision-group-name of created PlacementDecisions.
  • groupClusterSelector: Defines the label selector to select clusters subset by label.
• clustersPerDecisionGroup: A specific number or percentage of the total selected clusters. The specific number will divide the placementDecisions to decisionGroups, the max number of clusters in each group equal to that specific number.

With this decision strategy defined, the placement status will list the group result, including the decision group name and index, the cluster count, and the corresponding PlacementDecision names.

status:
...
  decisionGroups:
  - clusterCount: 10
    decisionGroupIndex: 0
    decisionGroupName: prod-canary-west
    decisions:
    - placement1-decision-1
  - clusterCount: 10
    decisionGroupIndex: 1
    decisionGroupName: prod-canary-east
    decisions:
    - placement1-decision-2
  - clusterCount: 150
    decisionGroupIndex: 2
    decisionGroupName: ""
    decisions:
    - placement1-decision-3
    - placement1-decision-4
  - clusterCount: 140
    decisionGroupIndex: 3
    decisionGroupName: ""
    decisions:
    - placement1-decision-5
    - placement1-decision-6
  numberOfSelectedClusters: 310

The PlacementDecision will have labels cluster.open-cluster-management.io/decision-group-name and cluster.open-cluster-management.io/decision-group-index to indicate which group name and group index it belongs to.

apiVersion: cluster.open-cluster-management.io/v1beta1
kind: PlacementDecision
metadata:
  labels:
    cluster.open-cluster-management.io/placement: placement1
    cluster.open-cluster-management.io/decision-group-index: "0"
    cluster.open-cluster-management.io/decision-group-name: prod-canary-west
  name: placement1-decision-1
  namespace: default
...

Troubleshooting

If no PlacementDecision generated after you creating Placement, you can run below commands to troubleshoot.

Check the Placement conditions

For example:

$ kubectl describe placement <placement-name> 
Name:         demo-placement
Namespace:    default
Labels:       <none>
Annotations:  <none>
API Version:  cluster.open-cluster-management.io/v1beta1
Kind:         Placement
...
Status:
  Conditions:
    Last Transition Time:       2022-09-30T07:39:45Z
    Message:                    Placement configurations check pass
    Reason:                     Succeedconfigured
    Status:                     False
    Type:                       PlacementMisconfigured
    Last Transition Time:       2022-09-30T07:39:45Z
    Message:                    No valid ManagedClusterSetBindings found in placement namespace
    Reason:                     NoManagedClusterSetBindings
    Status:                     False
    Type:                       PlacementSatisfied
  Number Of Selected Clusters:  0
...

The Placement has 2 types of condition, PlacementMisconfigured and PlacementSatisfied.

• If the condition PlacementMisconfigured is true, means your placement has configuration errors, the message tells you more details about the failure.
• If the condition PlacementSatisfied is false, means no ManagedCluster satisfy this placement, the message tells you more details about the failure. In this example, it is because no ManagedClusterSetBindings found in placement namespace.

Check the Placement events

For example:

$ kubectl describe placement <placement-name> 
Name:         demo-placement
Namespace:    default
Labels:       <none>
Annotations:  <none>
API Version:  cluster.open-cluster-management.io/v1beta1
Kind:         Placement
...
Events:
  Type    Reason          Age   From                 Message
  ----    ------          ----  ----                 -------
  Normal  DecisionCreate  2m10s   placementController  Decision demo-placement-decision-1 is created with placement demo-placement in namespace default
  Normal  DecisionUpdate  2m10s   placementController  Decision demo-placement-decision-1 is updated with placement demo-placement in namespace default
  Normal  ScoreUpdate     2m10s   placementController  cluster1:0 cluster2:100 cluster3:200
  Normal  DecisionUpdate  3s      placementController  Decision demo-placement-decision-1 is updated with placement demo-placement in namespace default
  Normal  ScoreUpdate     3s      placementController  cluster1:200 cluster2:145 cluster3:189 cluster4:200

The placement controller will give a score to each filtered ManagedCluster and generate an event for it. When the cluster score changes, a new event will generate. You can check the score of each cluster in the Placment events, to know why some clusters with lower score are not selected.

Debug

If you want to know more defails of how clusters are selected in each step, can following below step to access the debug endpoint.

Create clusterrole “debugger” to access debug path and bind this to anonymous user.

kubectl create clusterrole "debugger" --verb=get --non-resource-url="/debug/*"
kubectl create clusterrolebinding debugger --clusterrole=debugger --user=system:anonymous

Export placement 8443 port to local.

kubectl port-forward -n open-cluster-management-hub deploy/cluster-manager-placement-controller 8443:8443

Curl below url to debug one specific placement.

curl -k  https://127.0.0.1:8443/debug/placements/<namespace>/<name>

For example, the environment has a Placement named placement1 in default namespace, which selects 2 ManagedClusters, the output would be like:

$ curl -k  https://127.0.0.1:8443/debug/placements/default/placement1
{"filteredPiplieResults":[{"name":"Predicate","filteredClusters":["cluster1","cluster2"]},{"name":"Predicate,TaintToleration","filteredClusters":["cluster1","cluster2"]}],"prioritizeResults":[{"name":"Balance","weight":1,"scores":{"cluster1":100,"cluster2":100}},{"name":"Steady","weight":1,"scores":{"cluster1":100,"cluster2":100}}]}

Future work

In addition to selecting cluster by predicates, we are still working on other advanced features including

• Various workload spread policies.