sidekick is a high-performance sidecar load-balancer. By attaching a tiny load balancer as a sidecar to each of the client application processes, you can eliminate the centralized loadbalancer bottleneck and DNS failover management. sidekick automatically avoids sending traffic to the failed servers by checking their health via the readiness API and HTTP error returns.

Table of Contents

Download

Download Binary Releases for various platforms.

Usage

USAGE:
  sidekick [FLAGS] ENDPOINTs...
  sidekick [FLAGS] ENDPOINT{1...N}

FLAGS:
  --address value, -a value          listening address for sidekick (default: ":8080")
  --health-path value, -p value      health check path
  --health-duration value, -d value  health check duration in seconds (default: 5)
  --insecure, -i                     disable TLS certificate verification
  --log , -l                         enable logging
  --trace, -t                        enable HTTP tracing
  --quiet                            disable console messages
  --json                             output sidekick logs and trace in json format
  --debug                            output verbose trace
  --help, -h                         show help
  --version, -v                      print the version

Examples

Load balance across a web service using DNS provided IPs.

$ sidekick --health-path=/ready http://myapp.myorg.dom

Load balance across 4 MinIO Servers (http://minio1:9000 to http://minio4:9000)

$ sidekick --health-path=/minio/health/ready --address :8000 http://minio{1...4}:9000

Load balance across 16 MinIO Servers (http://minio1:9000 to http://minio16:9000)

$ sidekick --health-path=/minio/health/ready http://minio{1...16}:9000

Realworld Example with spark-orchestrator

As spark driver, executor sidecars, to begin with install spark-operator and MinIO on your kubernetes cluster

optional create a kubernetes namespace spark-operator

kubectl create ns spark-operator

Configure spark-orchestrator

We shall be using maintained spark operator by GCP at https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/spark-on-k8s-operator

helm repo add incubator http://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-charts-incubator
helm install spark-operator incubator/sparkoperator --namespace spark-operator  --set sparkJobNamespace=spark-operator --set enableWebhook=true

Install MinIO

helm install minio-distributed stable/minio --namespace spark-operator --set accessKey=minio,secretKey=minio123,persistence.enabled=false,mode=distributed

NOTE: persistence is disabled here for testing, make sure you are using persistence with PVs for production workload. For more details read our helm documentation

Once minio-distributed is up and running configure mc and upload some data, we shall choose mybucket as our bucketname.

Port-forward to access minio-cluster locally.

kubectl port-forward pod/minio-distributed-0 9000

Create bucket named mybucket and upload some text data for spark word count sample.

mc config host add minio-distributed http://localhost:9000 minio minio123
mc mb minio-distributed/mybucket
mc cp /etc/hosts minio-distributed/mybucket/mydata/{1..4}.txt

Run the spark job

apiVersion: "sparkoperator.k8s.io/v1beta2"
kind: SparkApplication
metadata:
  name: spark-minio-app
  namespace: spark-operator
spec:
  sparkConf:
    spark.kubernetes.allocation.batch.size: "50"
  hadoopConf:
    "fs.s3a.endpoint": "http://127.0.0.1:9000"
    "fs.s3a.access.key": "minio"
    "fs.s3a.secret.key": "minio123"
    "fs.s3a.path.style.access": "true"
    "fs.s3a.impl": "org.apache.hadoop.fs.s3a.S3AFileSystem"
  type: Scala
  sparkVersion: 2.4.5
  mode: cluster
  image: minio/spark:v2.4.5-hadoop-3.1
  imagePullPolicy: Always
  restartPolicy:
      type: OnFailure
      onFailureRetries: 3
      onFailureRetryInterval: 10
      onSubmissionFailureRetries: 5
      onSubmissionFailureRetryInterval: 20

  mainClass: org.apache.spark.examples.JavaWordCount
  mainApplicationFile: "local:///opt/spark/examples/target/original-spark-examples_2.11-2.4.6-SNAPSHOT.jar"
  arguments:
  - "s3a://mytestbucket/mydata"
  driver:
    cores: 1
    coreLimit: "1000m"
    memory: "512m"
    labels:
      version: 2.4.5
    sidecars:
    - name: minio-lb
      image: "minio/sidekick:v0.1.4"
      imagePullPolicy: Always
      args: ["--health-path", "/minio/health/ready", "--address", ":9000", "http://minio-distributed-{0...3}.minio-distributed-svc.spark-operator.svc.cluster.local:9000"]
      ports:
        - containerPort: 9000

  executor:
    cores: 1
    instances: 4
    memory: "512m"
    labels:
      version: 2.4.5
    sidecars:
    - name: minio-lb
      image: "minio/sidekick:v0.1.4"
      imagePullPolicy: Always
      args: ["--health-path", "/minio/health/ready", "--address", ":9000", "http://minio-distributed-{0...3}.minio-distributed-svc.spark-operator.svc.cluster.local:9000"]
      ports:
        - containerPort: 9000

kubectl create -f spark-job.yaml
kubectl logs -f --namespace spark-operator spark-minio-app-driver spark-kubernetes-driver

Roadmap

S3 Cache: Use an S3 compatible object storage for shared cache storage

movvamrocks/sidekick