API going into 502 Gateway timeout on AWS EKS when high load - amazon-web-services

I've currently deployed a REST api onto a EKS cluster with ExternalDNS, HPA, VPA, Cluster Autoscaler etc.. and I am facing a big issue regarding load.
I did a few load tests by swarming the api with requests, the problem is that:
the api seems extremely slow to respond (i have the same api deployed on another platform and performs significantly better
After a few requests, they all start to return 502 timeout.
I know for a fact it is not a problem of CPU or memory usage since the pods have 1vCPU and 1 Gb of memory and they don't use not even 20% of it.
In grafana i see the kube-proxy receiving those requests and some get the needed response, but the others fail.
What could the problem be? Any help/advice is much appreciated

Related

Conceptual question regarding scaling REST API

I have a general question regarding how APIs are scaled. I have a basic RESTful API powered by Django rest framework, the backend uses RDS for database management. Right now, I'm deploying my django application to a digitalocean droplet but thinking of switching over to EC2 or potentially EKS. Is my understanding correct that I can effectively point my application to the RDS endpoint and spin up several EC2 instances with the same Django application fronted by an ELB? Would this take care of incoming traffic and the scalability of the django application?
This isn't exactly a coding question so I'm not sure if this is the best stackexchange site to ask this.
My two cents here:
I`ve been using lambda to serve Django and Flask apis for quite some time now, and it works great. You don't need to worry about scalability at all, unless there is a chance that your API would receive more than 10,000 requests per second (very unlikely on most scenarios). It will be way cheaper than EKS, even cheaper than EC2. I have a app with 400k active users which is served by an API running on lambda, I never paid more than $25 on invokations.
You can use Zappa (which is exclusively for python, I recommend) or Serverless framework, they will take care of most of the heavy work and make the deployment very easy.
But have in mind that lambda is not very good for long running tasks, like cronjobs. If you have have crons that might take some time to be executed your invokations can get a little expensive if you invoke it ofteen (lambdas can run up to 15 minutes, but those 15 minutes will be much more expensive than EC2). Also, the apigateway in front of the lambda function have a 30 seconds timeout, so your requests must be processed before that. If you think your requests will take longer, you will need to leverage some async requests. I think it is a very small price to have a full service without having to worry about the infrastructure.
You are right, but you can think not only about ec2 and EKS. You can also look into ECS and Fargate options. ELB distribute traffic across compute resources inside Target Group and it can be Autoscaling Group for EC2. Also, with RDS you can scale read replicas for handling mor read traffic independent from master node

AWS ECS Fargate: Application Load Balancer Returns 503 with a Weird Pattern

(NOTE: I've modified my original post since I've now collected a little more data.)
Something just started happening today after several weeks of no issues and I can't think of anything I changed that would've caused this.
I have a Spring Boot app living behind an NGINX proxy (all Dockerized), all of which is in an AWS ECS Fargate cluster.
After deployment, I'm noticing that--randomly (as in, sometimes this doesn't happen)--a call to the services being served up by Spring Boot will 503 (behind the NGINX proxy). It seems to do this on every second deployment, with a subsequent deployment fixing the matter, i.e. calls to the server will succeed for awhile (maybe a few seconds; maybe a few minutes), but then stop.
I looked at the "HealthyHostCount" and I noticed that when I get the 503 and my main target group says it has no registered/healthy hosts in either AZ. I'm not sure what would cause the TG to deregister a target, especially since a subsequent deployment seems to "fix" the issue.
Any insight/help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
UPDATE
It looks as though it seems to happen right after I "terminate original task set" from the Blue/Green deployment from CodeDeploy. I'm wondering if it's an AZ issue, i.e. I haven't specified enough tasks to run on them both.
I think it likely your services are failing the health check on the TargetGroup.
When the TargetGroup determines that an existing target is unhealthy, it will unregister it, which will cause ECS to then launch a task to replace it. In the meantime you'll typically see Gateway errors like this.
On the ECS page, click your service, then click on the Events tab... if I am correct, here you'd see messages about why the task was stopped like 'unhealthy' or 'health check timeout'.
The cause can be myriad. An overloaded cluster (probably not the case with Fargate), not enough resources, a runaway request that eats all the memory or CPU.
You case smells like a slow startup issue. ECS web services have a 'Health Check Grace Period'... that is, a time to wait before health checks start. If your container takes too long to get started when first launched, the first couple of health checks may fail and cause the tasks to 'cycle'. A new deployment may be slower if your images are particularly large, because the ECS host has to download the image. Fargate, in general, is a bit slower than EC2 hosts because of overhead in how it sets up networking. If the slow startup is your problem, you can try increasing this grace period, but should also investigate how to speed your container startup time (decrease image size, other nginx tweaks to speed intialization, etc).
It turns out it was an issue with how I'd configured one of my target groups and/or the ALB, although what the exact issue was, I couldn't determine as I re-created the TGs and the service from scratch.
If I had to guess, I'd guess my TG wasn't configured with the right port, or the ALB had a bad rule/listener.
If anyone else had this issue after creating a new environment for an existing app, make sure you configure your security groups. My environment was timing out (and had bad health) because my web pages did not have access to the database inbound rule on AWS.
You can see if this is your issue if you are able to connect to urls in your app that do not connect to the same web services/databases.

Lag spikes on google container engine running a flask restful api

I'm running flask restplus api on google container engine with TCP Load Balancer. The flask restplus api makes calls to google cloud datastore or cloud sql but this does not seem to be the problem.
A few times a day or even more, there is a moment of latency spikes. Restarting the pod solves this or it solves itself in a 5 to 10 minute period. Of course this is too much and needs to be resolved.
Anyone knows what could be the problem or has experience with these kind of issues?
Thx
One thing you could try is monitoring your instance CPU load.
Although the latency doesn't correspond with usage spikes, it may be the case that there is a cumulative effect on CPU load and the latency you're experiencing occurs when the CPU reaches a given % and needs to back off temporarily. If this is the case you could make use of cluster autoscaling, or try running a higher spec machine to see if that makes any difference. Or, if you have limited CPU use on pods/containers, try increasing this limit.
If you're confident CPU isn’t the cause of the issue, you could try to SSH into the affected instance when the issue is occurring, send a request through the load balancer and use tcpdump to analyse the traffic coming in and out. You may be able to spot if the latency stems from the load balancer (by monitoring the latency of HTTP traffic to the instance), or to Cloud Datastore or Cloud SQL (from the instance).
Alternatively, try using strace to monitor the relevant processes both before and during the latency, or dtrace to monitor the system as a whole.

Performance issues with weave networking on Kubernetes cluster

I create a Kubernetes (v1.6.1) cluster on AWS with one master and two slave nodes, then I spin up mysql instance using helm and deploy a simple Django web-app that queries latest five rows from the database and displays it. For my web service I specify 'type: LoadBalancer' which creates an ELB on AWS.
If I use 'weave' networking and scale my web-app to at least two replicas, then I begin experiencing inconsistent response time - most of the time it is reasonable (like 0.1-0.2 s), but 20-40% requests take significantly longer (3-5 s, sometimes even more than 15 s). However, if I switch to 'flannel' networking, everything works fast, even with 20-30 replicas of the web-app. All machines have enough resources, so that's not the problem.
I tried debugging to find out what's causing the delay, and the best explanation I have is that AWS ELB doesn't work well with 'weave'. Has anyone experienced similar issues? What could be the problem? Please let me know if I should provide some relevant information.
P.S. I'm new to using Kubernetes.

Elastic Beanstalk / ELB adding over 60ms latency

I'm running a microservice on AWS Elastic Beanstalk which is logging it's responses internally at 1-4ms, but the AWS Dashboard is showing an average of 68ms (not even counting latency to/from AWS). Is this normal? It just seems odd that EB/ELB would add 60ms of latency to every request.
It's configured to use a Docker container, which seems to use nginx. Although it doesn't seem to be configured to log the ttfb in the access logs, this is auto-configured by Amazon.
In testing I tried both a t2.micro, and a t2.large instance, and that had no effect on the test results. Is there something I can tweak on my end... really need to get this under 10-20ms (not counting rtt/ping distance) for the service to be useful.
It appears to have been a problem on Amazon's side... It was averaging 69ms on Friday, today (Monday morning) it's now 3.9ms