KubeSPT: Stateful Pod Teleportation for Service Resilience With Live Migration

Container orchestration systems, such as Kubernetes, streamline containerized application deployment. As more and more applications are being deployed in Kubernetes, there is an increasing need for rescheduling - relocating a running pod to different nodes - due to system upgrades, node failures, and load-balancing optimizations. Live migration, which transfers services from source nodes to target nodes with minimal downtime, is the ideal support for rescheduling. However, implementing live migration for pods that run stateful services is challenging, because Kubernetes manages pods as stateless. First, the current pod’s network namespace initialization process causes a mismatch in the network state between the migrated pod and internal containers. Second, migrating the memory state results in extended downtime. Third, Kubernetes operations on pods do not consider preserving the state of the pods. Therefore, we propose KubeSPT to achieve live migration of stateful pods in rescheduling scenarios. First, we synchronize the network state of pods and internal containers by controlling packet flow and implement fast service redirection. Second, we introduce a Hot Data and Lazy-Restore method for memory restoration to reduce migration downtime. Finally, we decouple pod migration operations from other Kubernetes operations to ensure compatibility with live migration. Experimental results show that KubeSPT reduces downtime by 86% –93% compared to current rescheduling methods.