Memory ballooning with Edera – Edera

Memory ballooning with Edera

This guide provides an overview of how Edera manages memory ballooning, including its default settings, dynamic and static memory allocation modes, and manual adjustment options using the protect CLI. Whether you’re deploying Kubernetes workloads or specialized environments, this guide will help you optimize memory usage effectively.

Default memory settings: Learn about Edera’s default max and target memory values and how to override them.
Dynamic mode: Understand how memory is automatically adjusted based on usage.
Static mode: Explore fixed memory allocation for advanced use cases.
Manual adjustments: Use the protect CLI to fine-tune memory settings.
Pod annotations: Simplify memory configuration directly in your Kubernetes manifests.

For a deeper dive into memory ballooning and advanced configurations, refer to our technical guide on memory ballooning.

Edera default memory settings

Default max memory: 1024M
Default target memory: 300M (also the minimum allowed)

ℹ️ Note: When a zone starts up, if you set max, min, or target below 300M, it will be overridden to 300M. You can override this manually using the protect CLI.

Memory resource policy

Edera supports two memory allocation modes: dynamic (default) and static.

Dynamic mode (default)

In dynamic mode, memory is adjusted automatically between configured min and max values based on actual usage.

Pods can omit the annotation, or include:

dev.edera/resource-policy: "dynamic"

Maximum memory

Calculated as the sum of all containers’ resources.requests.limits
If unset, defaults to 1024M
If below 300M, it is bumped to 300M

Dynamic memory behavior

Allocation is recalculated at intervals based on actual process usage.
If ≥90% of memory is unused → zone resizes to half
If ≥70% of memory is used → memory is increased to:
- The current maximum value, or
- Current usage + 80 MB

Check intervals

Start at 100ms on pod start, settling to 2s checks
Adjusts more aggressively on growth, less on shrink
Eventually stabilizes to equal 2s intervals once usage plateaus

ℹ️ Note: A zone may temporarily exceed its max allocation even without host pressure.

You can override the initial memory target using:

dev.edera/initial-memory-request: "<value in MB>"

Static mode (advanced use only)

Important

⚠️ Static mode is not recommended for most Kubernetes workloads using Edera.

Static mode disables dynamic ballooning, which can:

Lock in unused memory
Prevent scaling memory up or down based on real usage
Require restarts or manual intervention

Use static mode if:

You’re running non-Kubernetes workloads
You need predictable, fixed memory
You’re tuning performance in specialized environments

Max / min / target memory

In static mode, memory is fixed at the configured value—min, max, and target are all set at launch and won’t change regardless of usage. The only way to modify them is by restarting the pod or using the protect CLI.

Use this annotation:

dev.edera/resource-policy: "static"

All values set to:
- Sum of all containers’ resources.requests.limits
- dev.edera/initial-memory-request annotation, or
- Default of 1024M
Any value below 300M will be reset to the default target

Manual memory adjustment with the protect CLI

# Switch between static and dynamic
protect zone update-resources <zone_name> --adjustment-policy static|dynamic

# Set target memory
protect zone update-resources <zone_name> --target-memory 500

# Set minimum memory
protect zone update-resources <zone_name> --min-memory 300

# Set maximum memory
protect zone update-resources <zone_name> --max-memory 700

Putting it all together

Apply the Edera RuntimeClass

kubectl apply -f https://public.edera.dev/kubernetes/runtime-class.yaml

Verify it’s created:

kubectl get runtimeclass

Expected output:

NAME    HANDLER   AGE
edera   edera     1d

ℹ️ Note: The Edera RuntimeClass requires nodes to be labeled with runtime=edera. If you haven’t labeled your nodes yet, see the installation guides for instructions.

Deploy a pod with Edera

memory-pod.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: memory-test
spec:
  runtimeClassName: edera
  containers:
    - name: nginx
      image: nginx:1.25.3

Apply the pod:

kubectl apply -f memory-pod.yaml

Confirm pod is online:

watch kubectl get pods --all-namespaces --field-selector metadata.name=memory-test

Test with the protect CLI

Find the node:

kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -o json | jq -r '.items[] | select(.metadata.name == "memory-test") | .spec.nodeName + " " + .metadata.name'

SSH into the node and confirm the zone:

protect zone list

You should see something like:

┌────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────┬───────┬───────────────┬──────────────────────────────┐
│ name                       ┆ uuid                                 ┆ state ┆ ipv4          ┆ ipv6                         │
╞════════════════════════════╪══════════════════════════════════════╪═══════╪═══════════════╪══════════════════════════════╡
│ k8s_memory-hog_memory-test ┆ 08019dbc-efb9-49ac-aa45-f1b46dcccb3a ┆ ready ┆ 10.0.2.249/32 ┆ fe80::d882:bcff:fe45:cc5a/32 │
└────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────┴───────┴───────────────┴──────────────────────────────┘

Watch memory usage in a second terminal:

protect zone top

Update memory target to 4 GB:

protect zone update-resources --target-memory 4096 k8s_memory-hog_memory-test

You’ll see something like:

┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Edera Protect ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃name                 id                   status               total memory        used memory          free memory         ┃
┃                                                                                                                            ┃
┃k8s_memory-hog_memor 08019dbc-efb9-49ac-a ready                3.9 GiB             159 MiB              3.8 GiB             ┃

Alternative: Use pod annotations

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: memory-test
  annotations:
    dev.edera/initial-memory-request: "4096"
    dev.edera/resource-policy: "dynamic"
spec:
  runtimeClassName: edera
  containers:
    - name: nginx
      image: nginx:1.25.3

Additional notes

Tested with Edera 1.0.3-rc4

Last updated on 2026-01-21

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