According to AWS, the ELB healthy threshold is "Number of consecutive health check successes before declaring an EC2 instance healthy." It has an unusual interaction with Kubernetes, since all nodes will enter either an unhealthy state or a healthy state together depending on the service's healthiness as a whole.
We have observed that if our service goes down for the unhealthy threshold (which is 2 checks at 30 second intervals = 60 seconds), then the ELB will stop serving traffic to all nodes in the cluster, and will wait for the healthy threshold (currently 10 * 30 = 300 seconds) AFTER the service is restored to add back the cluster nodes, meaning it remains unreachable for an extra 300 seconds.
With the new settings, the ELB will continue to timeout dead nodes after 60 seconds, but will restore healthy nodes after 20 seconds. The minimum value for healthyThreshold is 2, and the minimum value for interval is 5 seconds. I went for 10 seconds instead of the minimum sort of arbitrarily because I was not sure how much this value may affect the scalability of clusters in EC2, as it does put some extra load on the kube-proxy.
The ELB client lookup isn't necessary because the service
does not operate across regions. Instead the client should
be built like the others by querying for the region from
the master node's metadata service.
A lot of packages use StringSet, but they don't use anything else from
the util package. Moving StringSet into another package will shrink
their dependency trees significantly.
Rudi Chiarito