Manage and use your Kubernetes cluster with Northflank

You can monitor and manage your cluster from the clusters page in your account settings. The total number of clusters and resources provisioned in your cloud provider accounts is displayed at the top of your clusters page.

To begin using your chosen cloud provider on Northflank create a new project and select your cluster as the provider. Every resource created and used in the project will be built, deployed, and served from your cluster.

Workloads will be automatically scheduled to nodes and node pools based on load and capacity.

You can monitor your cluster from by opening the overview from the clusters page in account settings:

• Details: see details of the cluster, including the state of the cluster and nodes, cloud provider, region, and Kubernetes version
• Nodes: contains the status of individual nodes, their ID and associated pool
• Node pools: view and edit node pool configurations
• Components: see the status of the cluster and Northflank platform components
• Cluster history: review the history of the cluster state, for example to check when an update took place and how long it took
• Projects: a list of projects created on the cluster

You can add, scale, and delete node pools on the node pools page in your cluster overview.

Click add node pool to add another pool, and to delete a node pool. Each cluster requires at least one node pool (Azure requires one pool to be the system node pool).

You should increase your nodes or add a node pool if your services are failing to progress from the staging state, which indicates your cluster is at capacity. You can either increase the number of nodes in a pool, or add another node pool if the capacity of your node pools is exceeded. As each node in a pool is identical, adding another pool will allow you to add nodes of a different type, with autoscaling, spot instances, or larger disk sizes.

You are recommended to provision a cluster with a node size that strikes a balance of node redundancy and resource efficiency, while taking into account your workload's specific requirements. Too few nodes make workloads susceptible to downtime due to node failures and replacements, while too many small nodes are less cost effective as they incur a larger system overhead.

Node type

The types of node available depend on your selected cloud provider, and you must have sufficient resource quotas available to deploy the desired type and quantity of nodes. Refer to the documentation for your cloud provider to select a type of node with sufficient resources for your workloads.

Node count

Select the number of nodes to create in the pool. Each node will be created with the same specifications defined by the node type.

Autoscaling

You can enable autoscaling to allow the cluster to automatically increase and decrease the number of nodes in the pool based on workload demand. Define a minimum and maximum number of nodes to ensure consistent availability, and to cap usage. Autoscaling can help prevent issues from attempting to run too many workloads for a set number of nodes, but will also mean your billing from your cloud provider will vary if more nodes are deployed.

Disks

You can select the size of disk to assign to each node in the pool. Each node will use a disk of the specified size as ephemeral storage for workloads, cached image layers, and container logs.

Spot instance

You can enable spot instances for a node pool to run workloads at a reduced cost on your chosen cloud provider, but these instances may be restarted at short notice. You may encounter issues provisioning node pools if the amount of available spot instances in a region or availability zone on a cloud provider is reduced.

Spot instances can be a good option to reduce costs for development and testing workloads, but your should ensure production applications can be interrupted and resumed without issue to take advantage of cheaper computing in off-peak hours. Otherwise, your production workloads should not be deployed with spot instances.

Spot instances are not available on Civo clusters.

Shutdown warning for spot instances

Kubernetes upgrades are managed by Northflank with no user intervention required, using our advanced upgrade system.

Upgrades to Kubernetes aim to minimise downtime, as workloads are redeployed according to your configuration for services and addons.

A Kubernetes upgrade follows the steps:

1. The master control plane is upgraded
2. Existing node pools are duplicated
3. Workloads are redeployed onto the new node pools in accordance with your configured redeployment strategy
4. Old node pools are terminated and the upgrade is complete

If you would like to discuss setting maintenance windows for your clusters, contact support@northflank.com.

You can delete a cluster from the cluster's overview by using the delete button. This will remove the entire cluster and associated resources from your cloud provider account. You must delete all projects hosted on the cluster first.