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 a GKE Autopilot cluster with a specific version. For example, the big news this week is that mutating webhooks are finally supported in Autopilot (from version 1.21.3-gke.900). While you will likely need to wait a bit for this to hit the Regular release channel for production stability, if you… 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
GKE Autopilot: how to know if Pending pods will be scheduled
GKE Autopilot is pretty magical. You create a cluster just by picking a region and giving it a name, schedule Kubernetes workloads and the compute resources are provisioned automatically. While Kubernetes is provisioning resources, your Pods will be in the Pending state. This is all well and good, except… there are other reasons that your… Continue reading GKE Autopilot: how to know if Pending pods will be scheduled
Configuring phpMyAdmin with CloudSQL, RDS, and Docker
I still have a place in my heart for phpMyAdmin, that tool that I was introduced when developing PHP on my shared hosting provider many moons ago. It’s just a great way to inspect your MariaDB/MySQL databases. These days I don’t install any web applications (or databases) on my local machine, I use Docker for… Continue reading Configuring phpMyAdmin with CloudSQL, RDS, and Docker
Adding spare capacity to GKE Autopilot with balloon pods
Autopilot is a new mode of operation for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) where compute capacity is dynamically provisioned based on your pod’s requirements. Among other innovations, it essentially functions as a fully automatic cluster autoscaler. When you deploy a new pod in this environment, sometimes they’ll be existing spare capacity on the cluster and it… Continue reading Adding spare capacity to GKE Autopilot with balloon pods