Spot Pods are a great way to save money on Autopilot, currently 70% off the regular price. The catch is two-fold: Your workload can be disrupted There may not always be spot capacity available For workload disruption, this is simply a judgement call. You should only run workloads that can accept disruption (abrupt termination). If… Continue reading Preferring Spot in GKE Autopilot
Separating Workloads in Autopilot
Autopilot while being operationally nodeless, still creates nodes for your workloads behind the scenes. Sometimes it may be desirable as an operator to separate your workloads so that certain workloads are scheduled together. One example I heard recently was a cluster that primarily processes large batch jobs. In addition to these spikey workloads that cause… Continue reading Separating Workloads in Autopilot
Developing in Rails via Docker
One of the neat things about Docker is that you don’t need to install any dev tools on your local machine. Sometimes though you’ll need to run commands in the dev environment without your app being built (say if there is an error building the app, or you want to run a command like rails… Continue reading Developing in Rails via Docker
Kubernetes Nodes and Autopilot
One of the key design decisions of GKE Autopilot is the fact that we kept the same semantic meaning of the Kubernetes node object. It’s “nodeless” in the sense that you don’t need to care about, or plan for nodes—they are provisioned and managed automatically based on your PodSpec. However, the node object still exists… Continue reading Kubernetes Nodes and Autopilot
Testing Knative on GKE Autopilot
Ahmet’s blog Did we market Knative wrong? got me interested to try out Knative again. I’ll confess that I found the original Istio requirement a bit of a heavy one just to run serverless, and it looked like the project has matured a lot since the early days. Version 1.0.0 was also just released, so… Continue reading Testing Knative on GKE Autopilot
Install kn on Cloud Shell
Want to run the Knative CLI tool kn in Google Cloud’s Cloud Shell? It’s easy: Download the latest release from github. linux-amd64 is the platform you want for CloudShell. Here I download version 1.0.0: Then, move it into place, and add it to your PATH:
Understanding Kubernetes Node Resource Allocation
The question often comes up: where do my node resources go in Kubernetes? In this post, I share how to use kubectl describe node to look at resource usage by different categories (system, user, etc). The way I think about Kubernetes node resource usage is to assign resource allocations into 4 categories: OS and Kubernetes… Continue reading Understanding Kubernetes Node Resource Allocation
Creating an Autopilot cluster at a specific version
Sometimes you may wish to create or update a GKE Autopilot cluster with a specific version. For example, the big news this week is that mutating webhooks are supported in Autopilot (from version 1.21.3-gke.900). Rather than waiting for your desired version to be the default in your cluster’s release channel, you can update ahead of… Continue reading Creating an Autopilot cluster at a specific version
Choosing the right network size for Autopilot
One of the most important decisions you can make for your Autopilot cluster is selecting the right network size. Too small and you’ll constraint your potential growth. Too large and you might run out of IPs if you have a lot of cluster. You can’t change the Pod address size after creation, so it’s important… Continue reading Choosing the right network size for Autopilot
Using GKE Autopilot in specific zones
GKE Autopilot is deployed using the regional cluster architecture. This has a number of advantages such as giving you 3 master nodes for high availability of the control plane, and the ability to spread pods among zones for high availability of your workloads. But sometimes this may be more than what you need. If you’re… Continue reading Using GKE Autopilot in specific zones