Managing clusters and node pools

Managing your clusters and node pools is the top infrastructure administration activity for a large-scale Kubernetes-based enterprise. In this section, we will look at several crucial aspects, including provisioning, bin packing and utilization, upgrades, troubleshooting, and cost management.

Provisioning managed clusters and node pools

There are different methods for provisioning clusters and node pools. You should choose the method that is best for your use case wisely because failure here can result in devastating outages. Let’s review some options. All cloud providers offer cluster and node pool provisioning via APIs, CLIs, and UIs. I highly recommend avoiding directly using any of these methods and instead using GitOps-based declarative approaches. Here are some solid options to consider.

The Cluster API

The Cluster API is an open-source project from the Cluster Lifecycle SIG. Its goal is to make provisioning, upgrading...