On Byzantine fault tolerance in multi-master Kubernetes clusters

Abstract

Docker container virtualization technology is being widely adopted in cloud computing environments because of its lightweight and efficiency. However, it requires adequate control and management via an orchestrator. As a result, cloud providers are adopting the open-access Kubernetes platform as the standard orchestrator of containerized applications. To ensure applications’ availability in Kubernetes, the latter uses Raft protocol’s replication mechanism. Despite its simplicity, Raft assumes that machines fail only when shutdown. This failure event is rarely the only reason for a machine’s malfunction. Indeed, software errors or malicious attacks can cause machines to exhibit Byzantine (i.e. random) behavior and thereby corrupt the accuracy and availability of the replication protocol. In this paper, we propose a Kubernetes multi-Master Robust (KmMR) platform to overcome this limitation. KmMR is based on the adaptation and integration of the BFT-SMaRt fault-tolerant replication protocol into Kubernetes environment. Unlike Raft protocol, BFT-SMaRt is resistant to both Byzantine and non-Byzantine faults. Experimental results show that KmMR is able to guarantee the continuity of services, even when the total number of tolerated faults is exceeded. In addition, KmMR provides on average a consensus time 1000 times shorter than that achieved by the conventional platform (with Raft), in such condition. Finally, we show that KmMR generates a small additional cost in terms of resource consumption compared to the conventional platform.