[rtpg]

how are Kubernetes apiservers suffering this much from this kind of query? Surely even in huge systems the amount of data that would need to be traversed is super small, right?

Is this a question of Kubernetes just sticking everything into "standard" datastructures instead of using a database?

[nvarsj]

My knowledge is out of date now, but the main issues IMO are/were:

- No concept of apiserver rate limiting, by design. I see there is now an APF thingy, but still no basic API / edge rate limiting.

- etcd has bad scalability. It's a very basic, highly consistent kv store that has tiny limits (8GB limit in latest docs, with a default of 2GB). It had large performance issues throughout its life when I was using k8s, I still don't know if it's much better.

[crabbone]

Long ago I wanted to re-implement at least part of kubectl in Python. After all, Kubernetes has documented API... what I quickly discovered was that kubectl commands don't map to Kubernetes API. Almost at all. A lot of these commands will require multiple queries going back and forth to accomplish what the command does. I quickly abandoned the project... so, maybe I've overlooked something, but, again, my impression was that instead of having generic API with queries that can be executed server-side to retrieve necessary information, Kubernetes API server offers very specialized disjoint set of commands that can only retrieve one small piece of interesting info at a time.

This, obviously, isn't a scalable approach, but there's no "wrapper" you could write in order to mitigate the problem. The API itself is the problem.

[mltsd]

Pretty sure the apiserver just queries the etcd database (and maybe caches some things, not sure) but i guess it could be the apiserver itself that can't handle the data :P

[alpb]

Kubernetes only lets you query resources by object type and that's only a prefix range scan on etcd database. There are no indexes whatsoever in the exhaustive LIST queries, and kube-apiserver handles serialization of the objects back and forth between multiple wire types. Over the years there has been a lot of optimizations, but you don't wanna list all pods in a 5000 node high density cluster every time you spin up client-side tools like this.

[remram]

In my experience, they don't, you can just run more of them and you can stick them behind a load-balancer (regular HTTP reverse proxy). You can scale both etcd and apiserver pretty easily. Of course you have less control in cloud environments, I have less experience with that.

[tasuki]

I no longer know anything about Kubernetes, but share your surprise! From first principles it seems the metadata should be small.