Blog: Scaling Preview Environments with Osiris

Scaling Preview Environments with Osiris Osiris How can you benefit from it in your own Jenkins X cluster? How does it work? One of Jenkins X’s core features is the preview environments : temporary environments created automatically for each Pull Requests, to deploy your application and its dependencies. You can then use this preview environment to run integration tests, or manually use/test your application. This is all great until you have more and more applications, each with a few dependencies (postgresql, mongodb, …) and a few opened pull requests at any time. This means that you’ll get more and more pods running in your Kubernetes cluster, in addition to Jenkins X’s own components, your build pipelines, and of course your staging and production applications - unless you are using multi-cluster. The result is that you’ll need more nodes or bigger nodes. Which means more money. But, these preview environments are in fact idle most of the time: they are only used for the integration tests, and sometimes when someone manually uses them. The rest of the time - including all night for example - they are just staying there, idle, and consuming resources. What if we could easily scale them down when they are idle, and automatically bring them up when we need them? So that a Pull Request staying opened for 2 weeks because someone went on vacation won’t consume resources in your cluster. Enter Osiris ! Initially created by the Deislabs team , Osiris is a Kubernetes component that will automatically scale down your “idle” pods, and scale them up when a request comes in. Although the original project has been archived, the Dailymotion team has taken over the maintenance of a fork. And they have been using it with success in their Jenkins X dev cluster for more than 2 years: they regularly have around 50 preview environments active at any time, and… 0 pods from these environments running at night - or on weekends.