Should I use Kubernetes if my servers are geographically dispersed?

General Discussions
1

(I also asked the question on SO, and got a NO answer. But before giving up on k18s (since I don’t really want to give up the nice features k18s offers) I’d like to ask the community again just to confirm.)

I have a bunch of servers, geographically dispersed, that are used to let users ping an IP they specify to test network latency from different parts of the internet.

I wonder if it’s appropriate that I use k18s to manage them? Specifically, I want to quickly bring up servers in all regions with the docker image I have, and I want to make sure there is at least one pod in each region that is live. Servers don’t necessarily have to talk to each other, but they should be able to use some shared config.

From the docs it seems Kubernetes assumes nodes should live close to each other the cluster shouldn’t be dispersed.

Should I use k18s for such task or I should consider some other options?

Thanks in advance.

2

Is it a cluster per region an option?

There are many things that just use lot of communication over the network (between nodes and control plane and even kube-proxy). A cluster is not really designed to be geographically distributed right now :-(.

If having multiple clusters is an option, I think you can consider it. But, is it an option?

3

Thanks for the quickly reply.

There won’t be many servers in each region, but there will be many regions. Not sure if multiple clusters can bring much benefit vs just mange each server manually.

4

Can you toss the link to the SO question here for reference? Thanks!

5

here is the link

6

Then I think you shouldn’t use it :frowning:

(The same for federation, it might be to immature and not worth the gains)

Sorry :frowning:

7

I’m inclined to agree with @rata. Kubernetes may not work well for your use case. If it is something you want to pursue, check out how Chik-fil-A put a kubernetes cluster in each of their restaurants. It’s a pretty good example of a small cluster at each site.

8

Thanks guys. Looks like I’m out of luck here. I’ll give multiple-cluster a try if the manual way turns out to be too painful.

9

Good luck! Please share your experience if you happen to try it! :slight_smile: