Documentation
Kubernetes add-on that detects and advertises hardware and software capabilities of a platform to facilitate workload scheduling.
Overview
Kubernetes is becoming more and more popular as the first Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project, for managing containerized workloads and services, and there are lots of productions based on Kubernetes in cloud industry today. However, there is no way to identify hardware capabilities or configuration Inability for workload to request certain hardware feature, especially non-allocable resources, like Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (Intel AVX), Intel Resource Director Technology (Intel RDT) in Intel platform. Intel and the open source community started Node Feature Discovery project to detect hardware features available on each node in a Kubernetes cluster, and advertises those features using node labels.
NFD consists of two software components:
- nfd-master is responsible for labeling Kubernetes node objects
- nfd-worker is detects features and communicates them to nfd-master. One instance of nfd-worker is supposed to be run on each node of the cluster
See more details Node Feature Discovery Overview.
Design and Architecture
Installation and Usage
Before using Kubernetes Node labels that published by NFD, NFD itself should be deployed through standard Kubernetes resource DaemonSet or Job. We recommend deploying NFD as a DaemonSet. This ensures that all nodes of the Kubernetes cluster run NFD, and new nodes get automatically labeled as soon as they become schedulable in the cluster. Meanwhile, as a DaemonSet, NFD runs in the background, re-labeling nodes every 60 seconds (by default) so that any changes in the node capabilities are detected.
For quick start, you can use the provided template specs to deploy the NFD release image with the default configuration in the default namespace.
Step 1 - Download and check the content of NFD yaml file
Step 2 - Apply Daemonset resource
Step 3 - Show the labels of the node
See more details Using Node Feature Discovery in a Kubernetes Cluster.
Demo Videos
Scheduling for workload performance on Intel® Architecture
See how easy it is to use Node Feature Discovery (NFD) as a Kubernetes* add-on to discover and schedule on advanced Intel processor features like Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 or VNNI.
Events
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe Virtual
Visit our booth HERE! (requires to be logged in the tool)