  By intrinsic necessity, Kubernetes is a complex platform. Its complexity
makes conducting performance analysis in that environment fraught with
difficulties and emergent behavior. Applications leveraging more "moving parts"
such as the Istio service mesh makes the platform strictly more complex, not
less. In this paper we study how underlying platform constitution and
deployment affects application performance, specifically in Kubernetes-based
environments. We alter platform constitution via use of native Kubernetes
networking or Istio. Platform deployment is altered via etcd data storage
location at two extremes on the performance spectrum: network disk and RAM
disk. Our results show that etcd performance has a large impact on that of
Kubernetes and its ability to perform orchestration actions, and thereby
indirectly on the performance of the application. The implication is that
systems researchers conducting performance evaluations cannot just consider
their specific application as being under test, but must also take the
underlying Kubernetes platform into account. To conduct experiments of
scientific rigor, we developed an experiment framework for conducting
repeatable and reproducible experiments. Our framework and resulting data set
are openly available for the research community to build upon and reason about.
