Snorlax ·

Snorlax is a Kubernetes operator that wakes and sleeps a specified set of Kubernetes deployments on a schedule.

You can also specify ingresses which will be updated to point to a wake server when asleep. When a request is received, the wake server serves a "waking up" splash page and wakes the deployments up. Once the deployments are ready, the ingresses are restored and the splash page will auto-refresh.

Why Snorlax?

Sleeping your environments is the equivalent of turning off the lights at night.

• Cost savings: Scale down your environments when they're not needed (e.g. overnight), freeing up cloud resources
• Security: Reduce the attack surface of your infrastructure when deployments are sleeping
• Environmentally responsible: Reduce the energy consumption of your infrastructure

As a common example, if you sleep all of your staging/ephemeral deployments for 8 hours each night and on weekends, they'll sleep ~55% of the month. That means ~55% savings on your cloud bill for those resources.

See it in action

Usage

1. Install the snorlax Helm chart to install the SleepSchedule CRD and controller

   helm repo add moonbeam https://moonbeam-nyc.github.io/helm-charts
   helm repo update
   helm install snorlax moonbeam/snorlax --create-namespace --namespace snorlax

2. Create your SleepSchedule resource to define the schedule for the deployment

   # filename: your-app-sleep-schedule.yaml
   
   apiVersion: snorlax.moonbeam.nyc/v1beta1
   kind: SleepSchedule
   metadata:
     namespace: your-app-namespace
     name: your-app
   spec:
     # Required fields
     wakeTime: '8:00am'
     sleepTime: '10:00pm'
     deployments:
     - name: your-app-frontend
     - name: your-app-db
     - name: your-app-redis
   
     # (optional) the ingresses to update and point to the snorlax wake server,
     # which wakes your deployment when a request is received while it's
     # sleeping.
     ingresses:
     - name: your-app-ingress
   
       # (optional, defaults to all deployments) specify which deployments
       # must be ready to wake this ingress
       requires:
       - deployment:
           name: your-app-frontend
   
     # (optional, defaults to UTC) the timezone to use for the input times above
     timezone: 'America/New_York'

3. Apply the SleepSchedule resource

   kubectl apply -f your-app-sleep-schedule.yaml

Other features

• Ingress controller awareness: Snorlax determines which ingress controller you're running so it can create the correct ingress routes for sleep.
• Stays awake until next sleep cycle: If a request is received during the sleep time, the deployment will stay awake until the next sleep cycle
• Ignores ELB health checks: Snorlax ignores health checks from ELBs so that they don't wake up the deployment

Try it yourself locally

(Requires make, minikube and helm to be installed)

Run make demo to:

• create a Minikube cluster
• install the latest Helm release of snorlax
• deploy a dummy deployment, service, ingress, and sleep schedule
• starts the minikube tunnel to proxy localhost to your Minikube cluster ingress service (you'll need to enter your password)

Then go to http://localhost to see either the sleeping page or the dummy deployment (depending on the time of day).

You can also then try updating the sleep schedule with kubectl edit sleepschedule dummy.

How to develop

(Requires make, minikube, helm, and docker to be installed)

Setup Minikube with the CRD and dummy application with sleep schedule:

make dev-setup

Then make your updates and run the operator:

make dev-run

Future work

• Scale entire namespaces
• Sleep when no requests are received for a certain period of time
• Add support for custom wake & sleep actions (e.g. hit a webhook on wake)
• Add support for cron-style schedules (e.g. 0 8 * * *)
• Add a button to manually wake up the deployment (instead of auto-waking on request)
• Custom image/gif for sleeping page
• Always sleeping mode, reset at a certain time of day
• Support waking a deployment on TCP connection
• Select deployments & ingresses by label
• Support wildcards for deployment & ingress names

Reach out

Wondering how to best use Snorlax? Have questions or ideas for new features?

I'd love to hear, and maybe even build them! Reach out to me at: