Azure Insights: Node pool provisioning; Managing logins; Availability Zones; Select statement

Azure pros share their thoughts on node pool provisioning, managing logins, Availability Zones, and using CLI select statement.

Over-provisioning node pools

Richard Hooper, writing on Pixel Robots, explored how to over-provision node pools with Azure Kubernetes Service. The service provides a cluster auto-scaler which can be used to quickly scale up. Users are able to set pod priority and preemptions, making room for the highest priority pods. Hooper explained the manifest to set this up:

If you want it for the full cluster, you can remove the node affinity section in the deployment section. Let’s explain a little first though as you will be deploying a few resources. First, we are creating a PriorityClass called overprovisioning and setting it to -1. Super low priority. Next, we are creating a new ServiceAccount, ClusterRole, and ClusterRoleBinding. You will see that the new service account has limited access on the cluster. This is good for security reasons, if you exec into the auto scaler pod you will not have full access to the cluster.

From there, users need to create the lower priority deployment setting the replicas and CPU requests. When a new deployment is created it serves as the auto scaler. Users will need to change the name of the deployment for the overprovisioning deployment.

Simplifying logins with Azure default subscriptions

Michel Luescher, writing on Cloudelicious, noted a common problem. All too often users end up running into the wrong subscription when trying to log in to Azure portal.