Don’t Lose Your Sleep Over It: Verifying Your Kubernetes Clusters with... Bingzhe Liu & Gangmuk Lim 

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Don’t Lose Your Sleep Over It: Verifying Your Kubernetes Clusters with Kivi - Bingzhe Liu & Gangmuk Lim, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Kubernetes controllers offer powerful ways to manage clusters, but they also can introduce risk of unintended behavior. Even a single controller contains a diverse range of configuration parameters that introduces the opportunities for mistakes, and moreover multiple controllers can interact badly with each other and with environmental events due to shared dependencies. For example, pods can fail to be created even though resources are enough, or can oscillate in an unending cycle of scheduling and eviction. This talk first presents a collection of pathological and unintended issues arising from controllers. Then it discusses Kivi, a prototype project that verifies correctness of Kubernetes clusters to help users detect issues before they apply changes. Kivi leverages model checking techniques that can either assure desired properties will be preserved, or generate minimal examples demonstrating violations. Kivi can also simulate the impact of operational changes.