Panic threshold
During load balancing, Envoy will generally only consider available (healthy or degraded) hosts in an upstream cluster. However, if the percentage of available hosts in the cluster becomes too low, Envoy will disregard health status and balance either amongst all hosts or no hosts. This is known as the panic threshold. The default panic threshold is 50%. This is configurable via runtime as well as in the cluster configuration. The panic threshold is used to avoid a situation in which host failures cascade throughout the cluster as load increases.
There are two modes Envoy can choose from when in a panic state: traffic will either be sent to all hosts, or will be sent to no hosts (and therefore will always fail). This is configured in the cluster configuration. Choosing to fail traffic during panic scenarios can help avoid overwhelming potentially failing upstream services, as it will reduce the load on the upstream service before all hosts have been determined to be unhealthy. However, it eliminates the possibility of _some_ requests succeeding even when many or all hosts in a cluster are unhealthy. This may be a good tradeoff to make if a given service is observed to fail in an all-or-nothing pattern, as it will more quickly cut off requests to the cluster. Conversely, if a cluster typically continues to successfully service _some_ requests even when degraded, enabling this option is probably unhelpful.
Panic thresholds work in conjunction with priorities. If the number of available hosts in a given priority goes down, Envoy will try to shift some traffic to lower priorities. If it succeeds in finding enough available hosts in lower priorities, Envoy will disregard panic thresholds. In mathematical terms, if normalized total availability across all priority levels is 100%, Envoy disregards panic thresholds and continues to distribute traffic load across priorities according to the algorithm described here. However, when normalized total availability drops below 100%, Envoy assumes that there are not enough available hosts across all priority levels. It continues to distribute traffic load across priorities, but if a given priority level’s availability is below the panic threshold, traffic will go to all (or no) hosts in that priority level regardless of their availability.
The following examples explain the relationship between normalized total availability and panic threshold. It is assumed that the default value of 50% is used for the panic threshold.
Assume a simple set-up with 2 priority levels, P=1 100% healthy. In this scenario normalized total health is always 100%, P=0 never enters panic mode, and Envoy is able to shift as much traffic as necessary to P=1.
P=0 healthy endpoints |
|
P=0 in panic |
Traffic to P=1 |
P=1 in panic |
normalized total health |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
72% |
100% |
NO |
0% |
NO |
100% |
71% |
99% |
NO |
1% |
NO |
100% |
50% |
70% |
NO |
30% |
NO |
100% |
25% |
35% |
NO |
65% |
NO |
100% |
0% |
0% |
NO |
100% |
NO |
100% |
If P=1 becomes unhealthy, panic threshold continues to be disregarded until the sum of the health P=0 + P=1 goes below 100%. At this point Envoy starts checking panic threshold value for each priority.
P=0 healthy endpoints |
P=1 healthy endpoints |
Traffic to P=0 |
P=0 in panic |
Traffic to P=1 |
P=1 in panic |
normalized total health |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
72% |
72% |
100% |
NO |
0% |
NO |
100% |
71% |
71% |
99% |
NO |
1% |
NO |
100% |
50% |
60% |
70% |
NO |
30% |
NO |
100% |
25% |
100% |
35% |
NO |
65% |
NO |
100% |
25% |
25% |
50% |
YES |
50% |
YES |
70% |
5% |
65% |
7% |
YES |
93% |
NO |
98% |
Panic mode can be disabled by setting the panic threshold to 0%.
Load distribution is calculated as described above as long as there are priority levels not in panic mode. When all priority levels enter the panic mode, load calculation algorithm changes. In this case each priority level receives traffic relative to the number of hosts in that priority level in relation to the number of hosts in all priority levels. For example, if there are 2 priorities P=0 and P=1 and each of them consists of 5 hosts, each level will receive 50% of the traffic. If there are 2 hosts in priority P=0 and 8 hosts in priority P=1, priority P=0 will receive 20% of the traffic and priority P=1 will receive 80% of the traffic.
However, if the panic threshold is 0% for any priority, that priority will never enter panic mode. In this case if all hosts are unhealthy, Envoy will fail to select a host and will instead immediately return error responses with “503 - no healthy upstream”.
Note that panic thresholds can be configured per-priority.