numacell

README

numacell device plugin

The numacell device plugin expose fake (and infinite) devices bound to the NUMA cells found in the system. When the kubelet's Topology Manager is configured with the single-numa-node policy, the workload can request to land on a specific NUMA cell on a specific NUMA node by explicitely requiring the corresponding resource and setting the spec.nodeName field.

Because of the guarantees the Topology Manager provides, that workload will either run on the specified NUMA cell of the specified node, or not run at all. This makes significantly easier to reproduce test scenarios.

However, using this plugin introduces a pretty strong imperative element in the declarative model of kubernetes. It breaks layering and the resource modeling.

For these reasons, we use the numacell device plugin to enable easier testing, but it should be never used outside this narrow and very specific use case.