Starting in version 1.8, Kubernetes provides a device plugin framework for vendors to advertise their resources to the kubelet without changing Kubernetes core code. Instead of writing custom Kubernetes code, vendors can implement a device plugin that can be deployed manually or as a DaemonSet. The targeted devices include GPUs, High-performance NICs, FPGAs, InfiniBand, and other similar computing resources that may require vendor specific initialization and setup.
The device plugins feature is gated by the DevicePlugins
feature gate which
is disabled by default before 1.10. When the device plugins feature is enabled,
the kubelet exports a Registration
gRPC service:
service Registration {
rpc Register(RegisterRequest) returns (Empty) {}
}
A device plugin can register itself with the kubelet through this gRPC service. During the registration, the device plugin needs to send:
ResourceName
it wants to advertise. Here ResourceName
needs to follow the
extended resource naming scheme
as vendor-domain/resource
.
For example, an Nvidia GPU is advertised as nvidia.com/gpu
.Following a successful registration, the device plugin sends the kubelet the
list of devices it manages, and the kubelet is then in charge of advertising those
resources to the API server as part of the kubelet node status update.
For example, after a device plugin registers vendor-domain/foo
with the kubelet
and reports two healthy devices on a node, the node status is updated
to advertise 2 vendor-domain/foo
.
Then, users can request devices in a Container specification as they request other types of resources, with the following limitations:
Suppose a Kubernetes cluster is running a device plugin that advertises resource vendor-domain/resource
on certain nodes, here is an example user pod requesting this resource:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: demo-pod
spec:
containers:
- name: demo-container-1
image: k8s.gcr.io/pause:2.0
resources:
limits:
vendor-domain/resource: 2 # requesting 2 vendor-domain/resource
The general workflow of a device plugin includes the following steps:
Initialization. During this phase, the device plugin performs vendor specific initialization and setup to make sure the devices are in a ready state.
The plugin starts a gRPC service, with a Unix socket under host path
/var/lib/kubelet/device-plugins/
, that implements the following interfaces:
service DevicePlugin {
// ListAndWatch returns a stream of List of Devices
// Whenever a Device state change or a Device disappears, ListAndWatch
// returns the new list
rpc ListAndWatch(Empty) returns (stream ListAndWatchResponse) {}
// Allocate is called during container creation so that the Device
// Plugin can run device specific operations and instruct Kubelet
// of the steps to make the Device available in the container
rpc Allocate(AllocateRequest) returns (AllocateResponse) {}
}
The plugin registers itself with the kubelet through the Unix socket at host
path /var/lib/kubelet/device-plugins/kubelet.sock
.
After successfully registering itself, the device plugin runs in serving mode, during which it keeps
monitoring device health and reports back to the kubelet upon any device state changes.
It is also responsible for serving Allocate
gRPC requests. During Allocate
, the device plugin may
do device-specific preparation; for example, GPU cleanup or QRNG initialization.
If the operations succeed, the device plugin returns an AllocateResponse
that contains container
runtime configurations for accessing the allocated devices. The kubelet passes this information
to the container runtime.
A device plugin is expected to detect kubelet restarts and re-register itself with the new
kubelet instance. In the current implementation, a new kubelet instance deletes all the existing Unix sockets
under /var/lib/kubelet/device-plugins
when it starts. A device plugin can monitor the deletion
of its Unix socket and re-register itself upon such an event.
A device plugin can be deployed manually or as a DaemonSet. Being deployed as a DaemonSet has
the benefit that Kubernetes can restart the device plugin if it fails.
Otherwise, an extra mechanism is needed to recover from device plugin failures.
The canonical directory /var/lib/kubelet/device-plugins
requires privileged access,
so a device plugin must run in a privileged security context.
If a device plugin is running as a DaemonSet, /var/lib/kubelet/device-plugins
must be mounted as a
Volume
in the plugin’s
PodSpec.
Kubernetes device plugin support is still in alpha. As development continues, its API version can change in incompatible ways. We recommend that device plugin developers do the following:
If you enable the DevicePlugins feature and run device plugins on nodes that need to be upgraded to a Kubernetes release with a newer device plugin API version, upgrade your device plugins to support both versions before upgrading these nodes to ensure the continuous functioning of the device allocations during the upgrade.
In order to monitor resources provided by device plugins, monitoring agents need to be able to
discover the set of devices that are in-use on the node and obtain metadata to describe which
container the metric should be associated with. Prometheus metrics exposed by device monitoring
agents should follow the
Kubernetes Instrumentation Guidelines,
which requires identifying containers using pod
, namespace
, and container
prometheus labels.
The kubelet provides a gRPC service to enable discovery of in-use devices, and to provide metadata
for these devices:
// PodResources is a service provided by the kubelet that provides information about the
// node resources consumed by pods and containers on the node
service PodResources {
rpc List(ListPodResourcesRequest) returns (ListPodResourcesResponse) {}
}
The gRPC service is served over a unix socket at /var/lib/kubelet/pod-resources/kubelet.sock
.
Monitoring agents for device plugin resources can be deployed as a daemon, or as a DaemonSet.
The cannonical directory /var/lib/kubelet/pod-resources
requires privileged access, so monitoring
agents must run in a privileged security context. If a device monitoring agent is running as a
DaemonSet, /var/lib/kubelet/pod-resources
must be mounted as a
Volume
in the plugin’s
PodSpec.
Support for the “PodResources service” is still in alpha.
For examples of device plugin implementations, see:
Kubernetes iDesktop Java
beta
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