# Right-sizer

To enable right-sizer, you'll need the following in your Insights Agent values.yaml at minimum:

right-sizer:
  enabled: true

As of Insights Agent version 4.0, Right-sizer now refers to multiple capabilities:

Automated Workload Right-sizer: A controller that manages VPA objects for automated right-sizing (BETA)
OOMKill Detector: A controller that detects, and optionally fixes, containers that have been OOM-killed

# Breaking Changes in Agent 4.0

Version 4.0

The 4.0 release of insights-agent contains breaking changes to right-sizer. This component has been rebranded to refer to Insights automated right sizing. The right-sizer prior to this release will be referred to as oom-detection going forward. These will be further consolidated in a future release to avoid confusion.

# Automated Workload Right-sizing (BETA)

# NOTE: Automated Workload Right-sizer is currently in BETA. Here's what you should know:

Automated Workload Right-sizer is designed to help automate setting of resource requests and limits for you. It uses Resource Recommendations from Fairwinds Insights to dynamically adjust container resources.
During the BETA period, we recommend that customers deploy Automated Workload Right-sizer in a dev or staging environment to start. This may mean starting with less-critical workloads and namespaces before expanding usage.
There may also be scenarios where Automated Right-sizer does not optimize resources correctly. This could result in over-provisioning or under-provisioning, or reliability issues such as OOMKills.
Automated Workload Right-sizer should not be used with the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) on the same resource metric (CPU or memory).

By default, Automated Workload Right-sizer is for every controller, the right-sizer will create a VPA object with updateMode Off, which will display recommendations, but not apply them. To enable Automated Workload Right-size to automatically apply right-sizing recommendations, you'll need to set

right-sizer:
  enabled: true
  config:
    default:
      vpa:
        updatePolicy: "Auto"

This can also be configured individually by namespace, see setup below.

# Setup and Configuration

The Right-sizer configuration can be added to your Helm values.yaml

right-sizer:
  enabled: true
  config:
    # when the controller is running with `--on-by-default`,
    # this is the configuration that will be applied to namespaces
    # which are not explicitly configured in `includeNamespaces`
    default:
      vpa:
        # full VerticalPodAutoscaler spec
        minReplicas: 1
        updatePolicy:
          updateMode: "Off"
        resourcePolicy:
            containerPolicies:
              - containerName: "*"
                maxAllowed:
                  cpu: 2
                  memory: "4Gi"
    # namespaces that will be explicitly included for recommendations
    # allows VPAs to be configured individually by namespace
    includeNamespaces:
      - namespace: "my-namespace-1"
        vpa:
          # this is a full VerticalPodAutoscaler specification
          minReplicas: 1
          updatePolicy:
            updateMode: "Auto"
          resourcePolicy:
            containerPolicies:
              - containerName: "*"
                minAllowed:
                  cpu: "100m"
                maxAllowed:
                  cpu: 1
                  memory: "2Gi"
      - namespace: "my-namespace-2"
        vpa:
          minReplicas: 1
          updatePolicy:
            updateMode: "Auto"
          resourcePolicy:
            containerPolicies:
              - containerName: "*"
                minAllowed:
                  cpu: "250m"
                maxAllowed:
                  cpu: 2
                  memory: "3Gi"
      - namespace: "my-namespace-3"
    # list of namespaces that are explicitly excluded from recommendations
    excludeNamespaces:
      - default
      - insights-agent

# Implementation Details

Right-sizer includes a custom recommender VPA component, we've modified the recommender to retrieve recommendations from Insights. When right-sizer is enabled, we will install the Fairwinds VPA (opens new window) helm chart with this custom image for you.

You can also opt-in (when on-by-default is enabled) or opt-out of automated right-sizing by annotating Namespaces:

insights.fairwinds.com/right-sizer = true | false

# OOM (Out-Of-Memory) Detection

OOM-Detection is a Kubernetes Controller that detects and optionally modifies containers that have run out of memory and been OOM-killed and maintains an Insights report of those containers with their owning pod-controllers (such as Deployments, StatefulSets or DaemonSets). The Controller persists report data in a Kubernetes ConfigMap which the accompanying Insights Agent CronJob retrieves and submits to the Insights API.

The oom-detection controller removes pod-controllers from its report when no OOM-kill has been seen within a time window (default 24 hours) or if the memory limits have been modified compared to the limits from the last-seen OOM-kill.

# Setup and Configuration

OOM-Detection is on by default when right-sizer is enabled:

right-sizer:
  enabled: true

right-sizer has been repurposed to include other automated right-sizing capabilities. Starting with version 4.0 of the Insights Agent, configuration is now defined in the oom-detection section under right-sizer

By default the right-sizer will only generate Action Items for Insights and it will not update memory limits when a pod crashes. When enabling this feature, you may want to also specify a list of Kubernetes namespaces to limit potential Action Item noise and impact to workloads.

To configure the right-sizer to increase memory limits when a pod crashes please see the right-sizer.oom-detection Helm values (opens new window) within the Insights Agent Helm chart.

Available configuration includes:

The minimum number of OOM-kills a container must have before memory limits are updated by patching its pod-controller
The limits increment which is multiplied by the current container limits to calculate the new limits to be updated
The maximum limits which is multiplied by the limits of the first-seen OOM-kill to calculate the highest value to which limits can be updated for that container
Namespaces which limit both where OOM-kills are considered and where memory limits will be updated

# Implementation Details

These are currently separate binaries and container images:

https://quay.io/repository/fairwinds/insights-right-sizer: refers to the VPA controller

https://quay.io/repository/fairwinds/right-sizer: refers to OOM-kill detection and resolution

The intention is to consolidate both of these in a future release once more testing has been done.

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