Configuring scaling for AKS – Creating and Configuring Containers

Apr 6, 2024

Configuring scaling for AKS – Creating and Configuring Containers

Configuring scaling for AKS

You will note that from our previous exercises, there was no option to automatically scale and resize containers. The only way to change this was to redeploy our container instances and groups. With Kubernetes, this dynamic changes as you can change the scale settings before and after your deployment, and they can be configured to scale manually or automatically. For this exercise, we will run through changing the auto-scale settings of our AKS cluster. Proceed as follows:

1. Sign in to the Azure portal at https://portal.azure.com.
2. Navigate to the AKS cluster you created in the previous section. On the left menu, select the Node pools option and click on your deployed agentpool node pool, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

Figure 11.56 – Configuring a Kubernetes cluster: Node pools

3. Selecting either the Overview or Configuration pane will present you with the option to change your pool scale settings. Click Scale node pool, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

Figure 11.57 – Configuring a Kubernetes cluster: Overview

4. To change the automatic scale option, set the Scale method type to Autoscale, enter a value for your Min and Max node count, then click Apply. The process is illustrated in the following screenshot:

Figure 11.58 – Configuring a Kubernetes cluster: Scale node pool

5. For the manual scale option, set the Scale method type to Manual, enter a Node count value (this will be the number of nodes you want to run), and click Apply. The process is illustrated in the following screenshot:

Figure 11.59 – Configuring a Kubernetes cluster: Scale node pool (continued)

6. After applying the settings, you will notice your agent pool goes into an Updating state, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

Figure 11.60 – Configuring a Kubernetes cluster: Updating

You now know how to scale your agent pools within AKS and can feel confident about managing this aspect. If you would like to change the VM size for the agent pool, you will need to redeploy the pool. In the next section, we will look at managing network configurations on your AKS cluster.