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

Popular posts from this blog

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.

Kubernetes–Limit your environmental impact

Reducing the carbon footprint and CO2 emission of our (cloud) workloads, is a responsibility of all of us. If you are running a Kubernetes cluster, have a look at Kube-Green . kube-green is a simple Kubernetes operator that automatically shuts down (some of) your pods when you don't need them. A single pod produces about 11 Kg CO2eq per year( here the calculation). Reason enough to give it a try! Installing kube-green in your cluster The easiest way to install the operator in your cluster is through kubectl. We first need to install a cert-manager: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.5/cert-manager.yaml Remark: Wait a minute before you continue as it can take some time before the cert-manager is up & running inside your cluster. Now we can install the kube-green operator: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kube-green/kube-green/releases/latest/download/kube-green.yaml Now in the namespace where we want t...

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         ...