Choosing and managing the cluster capacity

With Kubernetes’ horizontal pod autoscaling, DaemonSets, StatefulSets, and quotas, we can scale and control our pods, storage, and other objects. However, in the end, we’re limited by the physical (virtual) resources available to our Kubernetes cluster. If all your nodes are running at 100% capacity, you need to add more nodes to your cluster. There is no way around it. Kubernetes will just fail to scale. On the other hand, if you have very dynamic workloads then Kubernetes can scale down your pods, but if you don’t scale down your nodes correspondingly you will still pay for the excess capacity. In the cloud you can stop and start instances on demand. Combining it with the cluster autoscaler can solve the compute capacity problem automatically. That’s the theory. In practice there are always nuances.

Choosing your node types

The simplest solution is to choose a single node type with a known quantity of CPU, memory...