Beyond Kubernetes at Modal: How to Scale 1 Million Concurrent Sandboxes in Seconds

InfoQ Homepage News Beyond Kubernetes at Modal: How to Scale 1 Million Concurrent Sandboxes in Seconds

According to Weld and Adams, traditional container orchestration systems such as Kubernetes struggle to operate at this scale because they rely heavily on centralized coordination and strongly consistent state.

Running 1 million sandboxes pushes the limits of any container platform, both because of the sheer number of containers, but also because running this many sandboxes requires many tens of thousands of compute nodes. There will be many operations which are either O(containers), O(nodes), or both, which will cause traditional container platforms to hit scaling limits.