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A balanced leader election algorithm based on replica distribution in Kubernetes cluster

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Abstract

Kubernetes is a well-known open source project that provides a powerful orchestration platform for containerized applications. To ensure high scalability and availability of services, redundant deployment is usually adopted in Kubernetes clusters, creating multiple replicas for each application. Each replica of a stateful application needs to persistently store data and use a leader-based consistency maintenance mechanism to ensure strong consistency among replicas. In this mechanism, the elected leader is responsible for updating data and synchronizing it to the followers, which results in a higher workload for the leader. When there are multiple stateful applications, the Kubernetes leader election algorithm does not consider the distribution of multiple leaders among nodes, which may lead to the phenomenon of too many leaders on some nodes. This can reduce system performance due to the high workload of the leaders themselves. To address this problem, we propose a balanced leader election algorithm based on replica distribution, which enables multiple stateful application leaders to be evenly distributed among the cluster’s worker nodes. The algorithm effectively solves the problem of system performance degradation caused by leader concentration and achieves load balancing among nodes. We verify the effectiveness of the algorithm through experiments.

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No datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

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Acknowledgements

This work is funded by The Key Technology Research and Development Project of Henan Province under Grant 222102210055. Major Science and Technology Special Project of Henan Province, Research and Demonstration of Kunpeng Platform-based Domestic Operating System under Grant 201300210400. Supported by Research on Key technologies of resource scheduling and service High Availability based on ARM architecture, Project No. 232102210199.

Funding

This work was financially supported by Research on Key technologies of resource scheduling and service High Availability based on ARM architecture, Project No. 232102210199.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Software, Henan University, Kaifeng, 475001, China

    Junnan Liu, Yongkang Ding & Yifan Liu

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  1. Junnan Liu
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  2. Yongkang Ding
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Contributions

J.L. carries out the conception of experimental ideas and the formulation or evolution of overall research goals and objectives Method design and create models. Y.D. conducted experiments and wrote the main manuscript texts, images and table productions. Y.L. is involved in the analysis of the data and the production of the images. All the authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Junnan Liu.

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Liu, J., Ding, Y. & Liu, Y. A balanced leader election algorithm based on replica distribution in Kubernetes cluster. Cluster Comput (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-024-04333-6

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