Skip to content

Commit

Permalink
doc: update readme (#388)
Browse files Browse the repository at this point in the history
  • Loading branch information
sanposhiho authored Mar 21, 2024
1 parent e3c41cf commit 7ae0c8b
Showing 1 changed file with 41 additions and 29 deletions.
70 changes: 41 additions & 29 deletions README.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -1,11 +1,41 @@
# Tortoise

**Tortoise is under the active development and not production ready yet.**

<img alt="Tortoise" src="docs/images/tortoise_big.jpg" width="400px"/>

Get cute Tortoises into your Kubernetes garden and say goodbye to the days optimizing your rigid autoscalers.

## Motivation

At Mercari, the responsibilities of the Platform team and the service development teams are clearly distinguished. Not all service owners possess expert knowledge of Kubernetes.

Also, Mercari has embraced a microservices architecture, currently managing over 1000 Deployments, each with its dedicated development team.

To effectively drive FinOps across such a sprawling landscape,
it's clear that the platform team cannot individually optimize all services.
As a result, they provide a plethora of tools and guidelines to simplify the process of the Kubernetes optimization for service owners.

But, even with them, manually optimizing various parameters across different resources,
such as resource requests/limits, HPA parameters, and Golang runtime environment variables, presents a substantial challenge.

Furthermore, this optimization demands engineering efforts from each team constantly -
adjustments are necessary whenever there’s a change impacting a resource usage, which can occur frequently:
Changes in implementation can alter resource consumption patterns, fluctuations in traffic volume are common, etc.

Therefore, to keep our Kubernetes clusters optimized, it would necessitate mandating all teams to perpetually engage in complex manual optimization processes indefinitely,
or until Mercari goes out of business.

To address these challenges, the platform team has embarked on developing Tortoise,
an automated solution designed to meet all Kubernetes resource optimization needs.

This approach shifts the optimization responsibility from service owners to the platform team (Tortoises),
allowing for comprehensive tuning by the platform team to ensure all Tortoises in the cluster adapts to each workload.
On the other hand, service owners are required to configure only a minimal number of parameters
to initiate autoscaling with Tortoise, significantly simplifying their involvement.

See more details in the blog post:
- [Tortoise: Outpacing the Optimization Challenges in Kubernetes at Mercari](https://engineering.mercari.com/en/blog/entry/20240206-3a12bb1288/)
- [人間によるKubernetesリソース最適化の”諦め”とそこに見るリクガメの可能性](https://engineering.mercari.com/blog/entry/20240206-3a12bb1288/)

## Install

You cannot get it from the breeder, you need to get it from GitHub instead.
Expand All @@ -19,34 +49,17 @@ make deploy

You don't need a rearing cage, but need VPA in your Kubernetes cluster before installing it.

## Motivation

Many developers are working in Mercari, and not all of them are the experts of Kubernetes.
The platform has many tools and guides to simplify the task of optimizing resource requests,
but the optimization takes engineering cost in every team constantly.

The optimization should be done every time the situation around the service get changed, which could happen easily and frequently.
(e.g., the implementation change could change the way of consuming resources, the amount of traffic could be changed, etc)

Also, when it comes to HorizontalPodAutoscaler(HPA), it's nearly impossible for human to optimize.
It’s not a simple problem which we just set the target utilization as high as possible –
there are many scenarios where the actual resource utilization doesn’t reach the target resource utilization in the first place
(because of multiple containers, minReplicas, unbalanced container’s size etc).
## Usage

To overcome those challenges,
the platform team start to have Tortoise, which is the automated solution for all optimization needs to be done for Kubernetes resource.
As described in [Motivation](#motivation) section, Tortoise exposes many global parameters to a cluster admin, while it exposes few parameters in Tortoise resource.

It aims to move the responsibility of optimizing the workloads from the application teams to tortoises (Platform team).
Application teams just need to set up Tortoise, and the platform team will never bother them again for the resource optimization -
all actual optimization is done by Tortoise automatically.
### Cluster admin

See a detailed motivation in the blog post:
- [Tortoise: Outpacing the Optimization Challenges in Kubernetes at Mercari](https://engineering.mercari.com/en/blog/entry/20240206-3a12bb1288/)
- [人間によるKubernetesリソース最適化の”諦め”とそこに見るリクガメの可能性](https://engineering.mercari.com/blog/entry/20240206-3a12bb1288/)
See [Admin guide](./docs/admin-guide.md) to understand how to configure the tortoise controller to make it fit your workloads in one cluster.

## Usage
### Tortoise users

Tortoise has a very simple interface:
Tortoise CRD itself has a very simple interface:

```yaml
apiVersion: autoscaling.mercari.com/v1beta3
Expand All @@ -62,12 +75,11 @@ spec:
name: sample
```
Then, Tortoise creates fully managed autoscalers (HPA and VPA).
Despite its simple appearance, it contains a rich collection of historical data on resource utilization beneath its shell,
Then, Tortoise creates HPA and VPA under the hood.
Despite its simple appearance, each tortoise stores a rich collection of historical data on resource utilization beneath its shell,
and cleverly utilizes them to manage parameters in autoscalers.
Please refer to [User guide](./docs/user-guide.md) for other parameters.
Please refer to [User guide](./docs/user-guide.md) to learn more about other parameters.
## Documentations
Expand Down

0 comments on commit 7ae0c8b

Please sign in to comment.