The InstanceGroup
resource represents a group of similar machines typically provisioned in the same availability zone. On AWS, instance groups map directly to an autoscaling group.
The complete list of keys can be found at the InstanceGroup reference page.
You can also find concrete use cases for the configurations on the Instance Group operations page
On this page, we will expand on the more important configuration keys.
If you need to add tags on auto scaling groups or instances (propagate ASG tags), you can add it in the instance group specs with cloudLabels
. Cloud Labels defined at the cluster spec level will also be inherited.
spec:
cloudLabels:
billing: infra
environment: dev
Autoscaling groups automatically include multiple scaling processes that keep our ASGs healthy. In some cases, you may want to disable certain scaling activities.
An example of this is if you are running multiple AZs in an ASG while using a Kubernetes Autoscaler.
The autoscaler will remove specific instances that are not being used. In some cases, the AZRebalance
process
will rescale the ASG without warning.
spec:
suspendProcesses:
- AZRebalance
Autoscaling groups may scale up or down automatically to balance types of instances, regions, etc. Instance protection prevents the ASG from being scaled in.
spec:
instanceProtection: true
Instance groups can be linked to up to 10 load balancers. When attached, any instance launched will automatically register itself to the load balancer. For example, if you can create an instance group dedicated to running an ingress controller exposed on a NodePort, you can manually create a load balancer and link it to the instance group. Traffic to the load balancer will now automatically go to one of the nodes.
You can specify either loadBalancerName
to link the instance group to an AWS Classic ELB or you can
specify targetGroupArn
to link the instance group to a target group, which are used by Application
load balancers and Network load balancers.
apiVersion: kops.k8s.io/v1alpha2
kind: InstanceGroup
metadata:
labels:
kops.k8s.io/cluster: k8s.dev.local
name: ingress
spec:
machineType: m4.large
maxSize: 2
minSize: 2
role: Node
externalLoadBalancers:
- targetGroupArn: arn:aws:elasticloadbalancing:eu-west-1:123456789012:targetgroup/my-ingress-target-group/0123456789abcdef
- loadBalancerName: my-elb-classic-load-balancer
Detailed monitoring will cause the monitoring data to be available every 1 minute instead of every 5 minutes. Enabling Detailed Monitoring. In production environments you may want to consider to enable detailed monitoring for quicker troubleshooting.
Note: that enabling detailed monitoring is a subject for charge
spec:
detailedInstanceMonitoring: true
Kops utilizes cloud-init to initialize and setup a host at boot time. However in certain cases you may already be leveraging certain features of cloud-init in your infrastructure and would like to continue doing so. More information on cloud-init can be found here
Additional user-data can be passed to the host provisioning by setting the additionalUserData
field. A list of valid user-data content-types can be found here
Example:
spec:
additionalUserData:
- name: myscript.sh
type: text/x-shellscript
content: |
#!/bin/sh
echo "Hello World. The time is now $(date -R)!" | tee /root/output.txt
- name: local_repo.txt
type: text/cloud-config
content: |
#cloud-config
apt:
primary:
- arches: [default]
uri: http://local-mirror.mydomain
search:
- http://local-mirror.mydomain
- http://archive.ubuntu.com
{{ kops_feature_table(kops_added_default='1.17') }}
To add custom kernel runtime parameters to your instance group, specify the
sysctlParameters
field as an array of strings. Each string must take the form
of variable=value
the way it would appear in sysctl.conf (see also
sysctl(8)
manpage).
Unlike a simple file asset, specifying kernel runtime parameters in this manner
would correctly invoke sysctl --system
automatically for you to apply said
parameters.
For example:
apiVersion: kops.k8s.io/v1alpha2
kind: InstanceGroup
metadata:
name: nodes
spec:
sysctlParameters:
- fs.pipe-user-pages-soft=524288
- net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time=200
which would end up in a drop-in file on nodes of the instance group in question.
A Mixed Instances Policy utilizing EC2 Spot and the capacity-optimized
allocation strategy allows an EC2 Autoscaling Group to
select the instance types with the highest capacity. This reduces the chance of a spot interruption on your instance group.
Instance groups with a mixedInstancesPolicy can be generated with the kops toolbox instance-selector
command.
The instance-selector accepts user supplied resource parameters like vcpus, memory, and much more to dynamically select instance types
that match your criteria.
kops toolbox instance-selector --vcpus 4 --flexible --usage-class spot --instance-group-name spotgroup
apiVersion: kops.k8s.io/v1alpha2
kind: InstanceGroup
metadata:
labels:
kops.k8s.io/cluster: spot.k8s.local
name: spotgroup
spec:
image: 099720109477/ubuntu/images/hvm-ssd/ubuntu-focal-20.04-amd64-server-20200528
machineType: c3.xlarge
maxSize: 15
minSize: 2
mixedInstancesPolicy:
instances:
- c3.xlarge
- c4.xlarge
- c5.xlarge
- c5a.xlarge
onDemandAboveBase: 0
onDemandBase: 0
spotAllocationStrategy: capacity-optimized
nodeLabels:
kops.k8s.io/instancegroup: spotgroup
role: Node
subnets:
- us-east-1a
- us-east-1b
- us-east-1c
Instances is a list of instance types which we are willing to run in the EC2 Auto Scaling group
Indicates how to allocate instance types to fulfill On-Demand capacity
OnDemandBase is the minimum amount of the Auto Scaling group's capacity that must be fulfilled by On-Demand Instances. This base portion is provisioned first as your group scales.
OnDemandAboveBase controls the percentages of On-Demand Instances and Spot Instances for your additional capacity beyond OnDemandBase. The range is 0–100. The default value is 100. If you leave this parameter set to 100, the percentages are 100% for On-Demand Instances and 0% for Spot Instances.
SpotAllocationStrategy Indicates how to allocate instances across Spot Instance pools.
If the allocation strategy is lowest-price, the Auto Scaling group launches instances using the Spot pools with the lowest price, and evenly allocates your instances across the number of Spot pools that you specify in spotInstancePools. If the allocation strategy is capacity-optimized, the Auto Scaling group launches instances using Spot pools that are optimally chosen based on the available Spot capacity. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/APIReference/API_InstancesDistribution.html
Used only when the Spot allocation strategy is lowest-price. The number of Spot Instance pools across which to allocate your Spot Instances. The Spot pools are determined from the different instance types in the Overrides array of LaunchTemplate. Default if not set is 2.