How to Manage Nodes and Node Pools

Objective

OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes service provides you Kubernetes clusters without the hassle of installing or operating them. This guide will cover one of the first steps after ordering a cluster: managing nodes and node pools.

Requirements

• An OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes cluster

Nodes and node pools

In your OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes cluster, nodes are grouped in node pools (group of nodes sharing the same configuration).

When you create your cluster, it’s created with a default node pool. Then, you can modify the size of this node pool, or add additional node pools of different sizes and types.

In this guide we explain how to do some basic operations with nodes and node pools using the Public Cloud section of the OVHcloud Manager: adding nodes to an existing node pool, creating a new node pool…

Creating a node pool

In the Node pools tab, click on the Add a node pool button.

In the Create a node pool dialog, choose a name for your node.

Then choose the type of instance for your node pool. For this tutorial, we will choose a general purpose node, like the B2-7 flavor:

Finally, choose the billing mode (monthly or hourly) and validate to init the creation of the node pool.

Editing nodes to an existing node pool using the OVH Cloud Manager

Access our administration UI for your OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes clusters by clicking on the Managed Kubernetes Service menu in the Public Cloud section of the OVHcloud Control Panel

In this administration UI, you have five tabs:

• Service: here you will have a global view of your cluster, with important information like the status, the API URL or the kubectl configuration file.

• Node pools: you will find here the active node pools of your cluster. You will be able to add, resize or remove node pools.

• Containers and services: Coming soon…

• APIServer access: here you can manage the IPv4 ranges that are authorized to connect to the API
• Audit Logs: here you will find logs for your Kubernetes cluster's control plane

To add nodes to a node pool, choose your node pool in the Node pools tab, and click on the … button at the right, then select Edit pool.

Adding a node to an existing node pool

Click the name of your node pool. Click on Actions, then on Add nodes.

Select the number of nodes to add. The type of node is automatically decided, as a node pool can have only one type of instance.

Then you can choose the billing mode and anti-affinity properties. Anti-affinity ensures that nodes will be created on different hypervisors (baremetal machines) and therefore ensure the best availability for your workloads. Note that anti-affinity limits the number of nodes in the pool to 5 maximum (but you can of course create multiple pools). Activating Monthly billing will apply to all current and upcoming nodes in the pool.

After you validate, your nodes will be installed.

Deleting a node from an existing node pool

In the node pool edition section, click on Actions, then on Delete nodes.

Choose the number of nodes to delete, confirm the choice by typing DELETE in the confirmation field, and click on the Delete button.

After you click on Delete, the nodes will be deleted.

Deleting a node pool

In the Node pools tab, choose the node pool to delete and click on the … button at the right, then select Delete pool.

Confirm the choice by typing DELETE in the confirmation field, and click on the Delete button.

Go further

To have an overview of OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes service, you can go to the OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes site.

Otherwise to skip it and push to deploy your first application on your Kubernetes cluster, we invite you to follow our guide to configuring default settings for kubectl and deploying an application .