In case you missed some of these posts:
In today’s post, we gonna see how can we be cost-effective, by scaling the User node pool to 0.
Prerequisites
- Azure subscription
- Azure CLI
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster
Solution
Step 1. Open Terminal and login to Azure:
az login
Step 2. List the AKS cluster node pool (example):
az aks nodepool list --cluster-name devcoopsAKSCluster --resource-group devcoops --output table
Example output:
Name OsType VmSize Count MaxPods ProvisioningState Mode
--------- -------- --------------- ------- --------- ------------------- ------
nodepool1 Linux Standard_DS2_v2 1 110 Succeeded System
nodepool2 Linux Standard_DS2_v2 1 110 Succeeded User
Note:
- nodepoll1 is the System node pool type and as the name says, is hosting the important system pods like
CoreDNS. - nodepool2 is the User node pool and the main purpose is to host the application nodes.
Step 3. Scale the user node pool to 0:
az aks nodepool scale --name nodepool2 --cluster-name devcoopsAKSCluster --resource-group devcoops --node-count 0
Step 4. Validate:
az aks nodepool list --cluster-name devcoopsAKSCluster --resource-group devcoops --output table
Example output:
Name OsType VmSize Count MaxPods ProvisioningState Mode
--------- -------- --------------- ------- --------- ------------------- ------
nodepool1 Linux Standard_DS2_v2 1 110 Succeeded System
nodepool2 Linux Standard_DS2_v2 0 110 Succeeded User
The User node pool instance count is successfully set to 0.
Conclusion
Although, you could host your application on the System node pool, it’s not recommended, and it’s not a good practice. If you want to further optimize your AKS costs, i suggest to Start and Stop AKS cluster.
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