Kubernetes performance impact or overhead on running applications

Question

I'm trying to figure out what is the performance impact of Kubernetes on my applications.

I understand my applications are just Docker containers running on the K8s host, but still - the K8s application itself does has its cost. It manages networking, security, storage etc. What impact does it have (if any...) on my general application's performance?

Has anyone benchmarked it? Compared to just Docker or application running directly on a given host?

Answer 1

You can get some kubelet metrics from the Node Performance Dashboard. More information here

Here are some metrics for the kube-proxy.

And the network overlay performance will depend on the type of network overlay that you are using here are some for Calico comparing throughput with CPU usage.

You can also compare some of those metrics with profiling the running containers on your nodes using cAdvisor

Btw, on the later K8s versions the kube-proxy and overlay run in a container/pod.