Skip to main content

Azure AKS–Save some money using spot node pools

One of the ways you can save some money using Azure is by using spot node pools for your Azure Kubernetes Service cluster.

What’s a spot node pool?

Using a spot node pool allows you to take advantage of unused Azure capacity at a significant cost savings. At any point in time when Azure needs the capacity back, the Azure infrastructure will evict spot nodes. Therefore, Spot nodes are great for workloads that can handle interruptions like batch processing jobs, dev/test environments, large compute workloads, and more.

Remark: A spot node pool can't be the cluster's default node pool. A spot node pool can only be used for a secondary pool.

Pricing for a spot node pool

Pricing for spot instances is variable, based on region and SKU. For more information, see pricing for Linux and Windows. You do have the option to set a max price. In case the price is exceeded the spot node is evicted from your cluster.

Schedule a deployment to use the spot node pool

A spot node pool has the label kubernetes.azure.com/scalesetpriority:spot and the taint kubernetes.azure.com/scalesetpriority=spot:NoSchedule. We use this information to add a toleration in our deployment.yaml:

In case you have multiple spot node pools, you can use a nodeselector to select a specific pool:

More information

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

VS Code Planning mode

After the introduction of Plan mode in Visual Studio , it now also found its way into VS Code. Planning mode, or as I like to call it 'Hannibal mode', extends GitHub Copilot's Agent Mode capabilities to handle larger, multi-step coding tasks with a structured approach. Instead of jumping straight into code generation, Planning mode creates a detailed execution plan. If you want more details, have a look at my previous post . Putting plan mode into action VS Code takes a different approach compared to Visual Studio when using plan mode. Instead of a configuration setting that you can activate but have limited control over, planning is available as a separate chat mode/agent: I like this approach better than how Visual Studio does it as you have explicit control when plan mode is activated. Instead of immediately diving into execution, the plan agent creates a plan and asks some follow up questions: You can further edit the plan by clicking on ‘Open in Editor’: ...
Read more