How to scale up Kubernetes cluster with Terraform avoiding downtime? - azure

Here's the scenario: we have some applications running on a Kubernetes cluster on Azure. Currently our production cluster has one Nodepool with 3 nodes which are fairly low on resources because we still don't have that many active users/requests simultaneously.
Our backend APIs app is running on three pods, one on each node. I was told I will have need to increase resources soon (I'm thinking more memory or even replacing the VMs of the nodes with better ones).
We structured everything Kubernetes related using Terraform and I know that replacing VMs in a node is a destructive action, meaning the cluster will have to be replaces, new config and all deployments, services and etc will have to be reapplied.
I am fairly new to the Kubernetes and Terraform world, meaning I can do the basics to get an application up and running but I would like to learn what is the best practice when it comes to scaling and performance. How can I perform such increase in resources without having any downtime of our services?
I'm wondering if having an extra Nodepool would help while I replace the VM's of the other one (I might be absolutely wrong here)
If there's any link, course, tutorial you can point me to it's highly appreciated.

(Moved from comments)
In Azure, when you're performing cluster upgrade, there's a parameter called "max surge count" which is equal to 1 by default. What it means is when you update your cluster or node configuration, it will first create one extra node with the updated configuration - and only then it will safely drain and remove one of old ones. More on this here: Azure - Node Surge Upgrade

Related

Azure AKS Prometheus-operator double metrics

I'm running Azure AKS Cluster 1.15.11 with prometheus-operator 8.15.6 installed as a helm chart and I'm seeing some different metrics displayed by Kubernetes Dashboard compared to the ones provided by prometheus Grafana.
An application pod which is being monitored has three containers in it. Kubernetes-dashboard shows that the memory consumption for this pod is ~250MB, standard prometheus-operator dashboard is displaying almost exactly double value for the memory consumption ~500MB.
At first we thought that there might be some misconfiguration on our monitoring setup. Since prometheus-operator is installed as standard helm chart, Daemon Set for node exporter ensures that every node has exactly one exporter deployed so duplicate exporters shouldn't be the reason. However, after migrating our cluster to different node pools I've noticed that when our application is running on user node pool instead of system node pool metrics does match exactly on both tools. I know that system node pool is running CoreDNS and tunnelfront but I assume these are running as separate components also I'm aware that overall it's not the best choice to run infrastructure and applications in the same node pool.
However, I'm still wondering why running application under system node pool causes metrics by prometheus to be doubled?
I ran into a similar problem (aks v1.14.6, prometheus-operator v0.38.1) where all my values were multiplied by a factor of 3. Turns out you have to remember to remove the extra endpoints called prometheus-operator-kubelet that are created in the kube-system-namespace during install before you remove / reinstall prometheus-operator since Prometheus aggregates the metric types collected for each endpoint.
Log in to the Prometheus-pod and check the status page. There should be as many endpoints as there are nodes in the cluster, otherwise you may have a surplus of endpoints:

Need to upgrade AKS version from 1.14.8 to 1.15.10. Not sure if the Nodes will reboot with this or not

Need to upgrade AKS version from 1.14.8 to 1.15.10. Not sure if the Nodes will reboot with this or not.
Could anyone pls clear my doubt on this
If you are using higher level controllers such as deployment and running multiple replicas of the pod then you are not going to have a downtime in your application because kubernetes will guarantee that replicas of pod get distributed between different kubernetes nodes and when a particular node is cordoned/drained for upgrade or maintenance you still have other replica of the pod running in other nodes.
If you use pod directly then you are going to have downtime in your application while upgrade is happening.
Reading documetation we can find:
During the upgrade process, AKS adds a new node to the cluster that runs the specified Kubernetes version, then carefully cordon and drains one of the old nodes to minimize disruption to running applications. When the new node is confirmed as running application pods, the old node is deleted.
They will not be rebooted, only replaced with new ones.
When we try to upgrade by default AKS will to upgrade nodes by increasing the existing node capacity. So one extra node will be spinup with kubernetes version you are planning to upgrade.
Then using rolling strategy it will try to upgrade the nodes one by one.
It will move all the pods to new extra node and deletes the old node. This cycle continues until all nodes are updated with latest version.
If we have replicaset or deployment then there should be no downtime ideally.
We can also use the concept of podAntiAffinity so that no 2 pods will be in same node, and there will be no downtime

How to undo kubectl delete node

I have a k8s cluster on Azure created with asc-engine. It has 4 windows agent nodes.
Recently 2 of the nodes went into a not-ready state and remained there for over a day. In an attempt to correct the situation I did a "kubectl delete node" command on both of the not-ready nodes, thinking that they would simply be restarted in the same way that a pod that is part of a deployment is restarted.
No such luck. The nodes no longer appear in the "kubectl get nodes" list. The virtual machines that are backing the nodes are still there and still running. I tried restarting the VMs thinking that this might cause them to self register, but no luck.
How do I get the nodes back as part of the k8s cluster? Otherwise, how do I recover from this situation? Worse case I can simply throw away the entire cluster and recreate it, but I really would like to simply fix what I have.
You can delete the virtual machines and rerun your acs engine template, that should bring the nodes back (although, i didnt really test your exact scenario). Or you could simply create a new cluster, not that it takes a lot of time, since you just need to run your template.
There is no way of recovering from deletion of object in k8s. Pretty sure they are purged from etcd as soon as you delete them.

Kubernetes NodeLost/NotReady / High IO Disks

I am experiencing a very complicated issue with Kubernetes in my production environments losing all their Agent Nodes, they change from Ready to NotReady, all the pods change from Running to NodeLost state. I have discovered that Kubernetes is making intensive usage of disks:
My cluster is deployed using acs-engine 0.17.0 (and I tested previous versions too and the same happened).
On the other hand, we decided to deploy the Standard_DS2_VX VM series which contains Premium disks and we incresed the IOPS to 2000 (It was previously under 500 IOPS) and same thing happened. I am going to try with a higher number now.
Any help on this will be appreaciated.
It was a microservice exhauting resources and then Kubernetes just halt the nodes. We have worked on establishing resources/limits based so we can avoid the entire cluster disruption.

Pausing Dataproc cluster - Google Compute engine

is there a way of pausing a Dataproc cluster so I don't get billed when I am not actively running spark-shell or spark-submit jobs ? The cluster management instructions at this link: https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/beta/dataproc/clusters/
only show how to destroy a cluster but I have installed spark cassandra connector API for example. Is my only alternative to just creating an image that I'll need to install every time ?
In general, the best thing to do is to distill out the steps you used to customize your cluster into some setup scripts, and then use Dataproc's initialization actions to easily automate doing the installation during cluster deployment.
This way, you can easily reproduce the customizations without requiring manual involvement if you ever want, for example, to do the same setup on multiple concurrent Dataproc clusters, or want to change machine types, or receive sub-minor-version bug fixes that Dataproc releases occasionally.
There's indeed no officially supported way of pausing a Dataproc cluster at the moment, in large part simply because being able to have reproducible cluster deployments along with several other considerations listed below means that 99% of the time it's better to use initialization-action customizations instead of pausing a cluster in-place. That said, there are possible short-term hacks, such as going into the Google Compute Engine page, selecting the instances that are part of the Dataproc cluster you want to pause, and clicking "stop" without deleting them.
The Compute Engine hourly charges and Dataproc's per-vCPU charges are only incurred when the underlying instance is running, so while you've "stopped" the instances manually, you won't incur Dataproc or Compute Engine's instance-hour charges despite Dataproc still listing the cluster as "RUNNING", albeit with warnings that you'll see if you go to the "VM Instances" tab of the Dataproc cluster summary page.
You should then be able to just click "start" from the Google Compute Engine page page to have the cluster running again, but it's important to consider the following caveats:
The cluster may occasionally fail to start up into a healthy state again; anything using local SSDs already can't be stopped and started again cleanly, but beyond that, Hadoop daemons may have failed for whatever reason to flush something important to disk if the shutdown wasn't orderly, or even user-installed settings may have broken the startup process in unknown ways.
Even when VMs are "stopped", they depend on the underlying Persistent Disks remaining, so you'll continue to incur charges for those even while "paused"; if we assume $0.04 per GB-month, and a default 500GB disk per Dataproc node, that comes out to continuing to pay ~$0.028/hour per instance; generally your data will be more accessible and also cheaper to just put in Google Cloud Storage for long term storage rather than trying to keep it long-term on the Dataproc cluster's HDFS.
If you come to depend on a manual cluster setup too much, then it'll become much more difficult to re-do if you need to size up your cluster, or change machine types, or change zones, etc. In contrast, with Dataproc's initialization actions, you can use Dataproc's cluster scaling feature to resize your cluster and automatically run the initialization actions for new workers created.
Update
Dataproc recently launched the ability to stop and start clusters: https://cloud.google.com/dataproc/docs/guides/dataproc-start-stop

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