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Configure Multiple Schedulers

Kubernetes ships with a default scheduler that is described here. If the default scheduler does not suit your needs you can implement your own scheduler. Not just that, you can even run multiple schedulers simultaneously alongside the default scheduler and instruct Kubernetes what scheduler to use for each of your pods. Let’s learn how to run multiple schedulers in Kubernetes with an example.

A detailed description of how to implement a scheduler is outside the scope of this document. Please refer to the kube-scheduler implementation in pkg/scheduler in the Kubernetes source directory for a canonical example.

Before you begin

You need to have a Kubernetes cluster, and the kubectl command-line tool must be configured to communicate with your cluster. If you do not already have a cluster, you can create one by using Minikube, or you can use one of these Kubernetes playgrounds:

To check the version, enter kubectl version.

Package the scheduler

Package your scheduler binary into a container image. For the purposes of this example, let’s just use the default scheduler (kube-scheduler) as our second scheduler as well. Clone the Kubernetes source code from GitHub and build the source.

git clone https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes.git
cd kubernetes
make

Create a container image containing the kube-scheduler binary. Here is the Dockerfile to build the image:

FROM busybox
ADD ./_output/dockerized/bin/linux/amd64/kube-scheduler /usr/local/bin/kube-scheduler

Save the file as Dockerfile, build the image and push it to a registry. This example pushes the image to Google Container Registry (GCR). For more details, please read the GCR documentation.

docker build -t gcr.io/my-gcp-project/my-kube-scheduler:1.0 .
gcloud docker -- push gcr.io/my-gcp-project/my-kube-scheduler:1.0

Define a Kubernetes Deployment for the scheduler

Now that we have our scheduler in a container image, we can just create a pod config for it and run it in our Kubernetes cluster. But instead of creating a pod directly in the cluster, let’s use a Deployment for this example. A Deployment manages a Replica Set which in turn manages the pods, thereby making the scheduler resilient to failures. Here is the deployment config. Save it as my-scheduler.yaml:

admin/sched/my-scheduler.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
  name: my-scheduler
  namespace: kube-system
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
  name: my-scheduler-as-kube-scheduler
subjects:
- kind: ServiceAccount
  name: my-scheduler
  namespace: kube-system
roleRef:
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: system:kube-scheduler
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  labels:
    component: scheduler
    tier: control-plane
  name: my-scheduler
  namespace: kube-system
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      component: scheduler
      tier: control-plane
  replicas: 1
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        component: scheduler
        tier: control-plane
        version: second
    spec:
      serviceAccountName: my-scheduler
      containers:
      - command:
        - /usr/local/bin/kube-scheduler
        - --address=0.0.0.0
        - --leader-elect=false
        - --scheduler-name=my-scheduler
        image: gcr.io/my-gcp-project/my-kube-scheduler:1.0
        livenessProbe:
          httpGet:
            path: /healthz
            port: 10251
          initialDelaySeconds: 15
        name: kube-second-scheduler
        readinessProbe:
          httpGet:
            path: /healthz
            port: 10251
        resources:
          requests:
            cpu: '0.1'
        securityContext:
          privileged: false
        volumeMounts: []
      hostNetwork: false
      hostPID: false
      volumes: []

An important thing to note here is that the name of the scheduler specified as an argument to the scheduler command in the container spec should be unique. This is the name that is matched against the value of the optional spec.schedulerName on pods, to determine whether this scheduler is responsible for scheduling a particular pod.

Note also that we created a dedicated service account my-scheduler and bind the cluster role system:kube-scheduler to it so that it can acquire the same privileges as kube-scheduler.

Please see the kube-scheduler documentation for detailed description of other command line arguments.

Run the second scheduler in the cluster

In order to run your scheduler in a Kubernetes cluster, just create the deployment specified in the config above in a Kubernetes cluster:

kubectl create -f my-scheduler.yaml

Verify that the scheduler pod is running:

kubectl get pods --namespace=kube-system
NAME                                           READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
....
my-scheduler-lnf4s-4744f                       1/1       Running   0          2m
...

You should see a “Running” my-scheduler pod, in addition to the default kube-scheduler pod in this list.

To run multiple-scheduler with leader election enabled, you must do the following:

First, update the following fields in your YAML file:

If RBAC is enabled on your cluster, you must update the system:kube-scheduler cluster role. Add your scheduler name to the resourceNames of the rule applied for endpoints resources, as in the following example:

kubectl edit clusterrole system:kube-scheduler

- apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
  kind: ClusterRole
  metadata:
    annotations:
      rbac.authorization.kubernetes.io/autoupdate: "true"
    labels:
      kubernetes.io/bootstrapping: rbac-defaults
    name: system:kube-scheduler
  rules:
  - apiGroups:
    - ""
    resourceNames:
    - kube-scheduler
    - my-scheduler
    resources:
    - endpoints
    verbs:
    - delete
    - get
    - patch
    - update

Specify schedulers for pods

Now that our second scheduler is running, let’s create some pods, and direct them to be scheduled by either the default scheduler or the one we just deployed. In order to schedule a given pod using a specific scheduler, we specify the name of the scheduler in that pod spec. Let’s look at three examples.

admin/sched/pod1.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: no-annotation
  labels:
    name: multischeduler-example
spec:
  containers:
  - name: pod-with-no-annotation-container
    image: k8s.gcr.io/pause:2.0

When no scheduler name is supplied, the pod is automatically scheduled using the default-scheduler.

Save this file as pod1.yaml and submit it to the Kubernetes cluster.

kubectl create -f pod1.yaml
admin/sched/pod2.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: annotation-default-scheduler
  labels:
    name: multischeduler-example
spec:
  schedulerName: default-scheduler
  containers:
  - name: pod-with-default-annotation-container
    image: k8s.gcr.io/pause:2.0

A scheduler is specified by supplying the scheduler name as a value to spec.schedulerName. In this case, we supply the name of the default scheduler which is default-scheduler.

Save this file as pod2.yaml and submit it to the Kubernetes cluster.

kubectl create -f pod2.yaml
admin/sched/pod3.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: annotation-second-scheduler
  labels:
    name: multischeduler-example
spec:
  schedulerName: my-scheduler
  containers:
  - name: pod-with-second-annotation-container
    image: k8s.gcr.io/pause:2.0

In this case, we specify that this pod should be scheduled using the scheduler that we deployed - my-scheduler. Note that the value of spec.schedulerName should match the name supplied to the scheduler command as an argument in the deployment config for the scheduler.

Save this file as pod3.yaml and submit it to the Kubernetes cluster.

kubectl create -f pod3.yaml

Verify that all three pods are running.

kubectl get pods

Verifying that the pods were scheduled using the desired schedulers

In order to make it easier to work through these examples, we did not verify that the pods were actually scheduled using the desired schedulers. We can verify that by changing the order of pod and deployment config submissions above. If we submit all the pod configs to a Kubernetes cluster before submitting the scheduler deployment config, we see that the pod annotation-second-scheduler remains in “Pending” state forever while the other two pods get scheduled. Once we submit the scheduler deployment config and our new scheduler starts running, the annotation-second-scheduler pod gets scheduled as well.

Alternatively, one could just look at the “Scheduled” entries in the event logs to verify that the pods were scheduled by the desired schedulers.

kubectl get events

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