$ kubectl get pods
NAME                   READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
leader-elector-inmr1   1/1       Running   0          13s
leader-elector-qkq00   1/1       Running   0          13s
leader-elector-sgwcq   1/1       Running   0          13s

To see which pod was chosen as the leader, you can access the logs of one of the pods, substituting one of your own pod's names in place of

${pod_name}, (e.g. leader-elector-inmr1 from the above)

$ kubectl logs -f ${name}
leader is (leader-pod-name)

… Alternately, you can inspect the endpoints object directly:

'example' is the name of the candidate set from the above kubectl run … command

$ kubectl get endpoints example -o yaml

Now to validate that leader election actually works, in a different terminal, run:

$ kubectl delete pods (leader-pod-name)

This will delete the existing leader. Because the set of pods is being managed by a replication controller, a new pod replaces the one that was deleted, ensuring that the size of the replicated set is still three. Via leader election one of these three pods is selected as the new leader, and you should see the leader failover to a different pod. Because pods in Kubernetes have a grace period before termination, this may take 30-40 seconds.

The leader-election container provides a simple webserver that can serve on any address (e.g. http://localhost:4040). You can test this out by deleting the existing leader election group and creating a new one where you additionally pass in a --http=(host):(port) specification to the leader-elector image. This causes each member of the set to serve information about the leader via a webhook.

# delete the old leader elector group
$ kubectl delete rc leader-elector

# create the new group, note the --http=localhost:4040 flag
$ kubectl run leader-elector --image=gcr.io/google_containers/leader-elector:0.4 --replicas=3 -- --election=example --http=0.0.0.0:4040

# create a proxy to your Kubernetes api server
$ kubectl proxy

You can then access:

http://localhost:8001/api/v1/proxy/namespaces/default/pods/(leader-pod-name):4040/

And you will see:

{"name":"(name-of-leader-here)"}

Leader election with sidecars

Ok, that's great, you can do leader election and find out the leader over HTTP, but how can you use it from your own application? This is where the notion of sidecars come in. In Kubernetes, Pods are made up of one or more containers. Often times, this means that you add sidecar containers to your main application to make up a Pod. (for a much more detailed treatment of this subject see my earlier blog post).

The leader-election container can serve as a sidecar that you can use from your own application. Any container in the Pod that's interested in who the current master is can simply access http://localhost:4040 and they'll get back a simple JSON object that contains the name of the current master. Since all containers in a Pod share the same network namespace, there's no service discovery required!

For example, here is a simple Node.js application that connects to the leader election sidecar and prints out whether or not it is currently the master. The leader election sidecar sets its identifier to hostname by default.

var http = require('http');
// This will hold info about the current master
var master = {};

  // The web handler for our nodejs application
  var handleRequest = function(request, response) {
    response.writeHead(200);
    response.end("Master is " + master.name);
  };

  // A callback that is used for our outgoing client requests to the sidecar
  var cb = function(response) {
    var data = '';
    response.on('data', function(piece) { data = data + piece; });
    response.on('end', function() { master = JSON.parse(data); });
  };

  // Make an async request to the sidecar at http://localhost:4040
  var updateMaster = function() {
    var req = http.get({host: 'localhost', path: '/', port: 4040}, cb);
    req.on('error', function(e) { console.log('problem with request: ' + e.message); });
    req.end();
  };

  / / Set up regular updates
  updateMaster();
  setInterval(updateMaster, 5000);

  // set up the web server
  var www = http.createServer(handleRequest);
  www.listen(8080);

Of course, you can use this sidecar from any language that you choose that supports HTTP and JSON.

Conclusion