  Recent years have seen Kubernetes emerge as a primary choice for container
orchestration. Kubernetes largely targets the cloud environment but new use
cases require performant, available and scalable orchestration at the edge.
Kubernetes stores all cluster state in etcd, a strongly consistent key-value
store. We find that at larger etcd cluster sizes, offering higher availability,
write request latency significantly increases and throughput decreases
similarly. Coupled with approximately 30% of Kubernetes requests being writes,
this directly impacts the request latency and availability of Kubernetes,
reducing its suitability for the edge. We revisit the requirement of strong
consistency and propose an eventually consistent approach instead. This enables
higher performance, availability and scalability whilst still supporting the
broad needs of Kubernetes. This aims to make Kubernetes much more suitable for
performance-critical, dynamically-scaled edge solutions.
