How to find the empty aks cluster pools (no pods) using azure rest api?

Question

There is requirement , I need to identify the empty aks cluster pools in the azure subscription. Can we use the agentPoolProfiles for identifying the empty cluster pools or is there any rest api link for finding the empty aks cluster pools?

Answer 1

Hello Diwakar S

Thank you for reaching out.

When you say "empty", I will assume that you mean node pools that contain nodes without any pods than the ones managed by AKS (for example coredns, konnectivity, kube-proxy and so on).

In my opinion, there is no way to see that at Azure level because all your nodes will have at least the pods that are created based on the kube-system DaemonSets (like cloud-node-manager, kube-proxy and so on) scheduled on. I don't see how using agentPoolProfiles, Azure REST API or other methods at Azure level would be able to exclude that.

My suggestion is to use "kubectl" to find out the nodes that are using other pods than the mandatory ones and remove the others.

For example, the following command will display the namespace, pod name and the name of the node where the pod is scheduled in all namespaces:

kubectl get pods -o=go-template --template='{{range .items}}{{.metadata.namespace}} {{.metadata.name}} {{.spec.nodeName}}{{"\n"}}{{end}}' -A

Then you can exclude system pods like azure-ip-masq-agent, cloud-node-manager and so on with the following command in order to find the nodes that you need and remove the others. Please note that you may need to exclude other pods than I added in the command depending on your configuration.

kubectl get pods -o=go-template --template='{{range .items}}{{.metadata.namespace}} {{.metadata.name}} {{.spec.nodeName}}{{"\n"}}{{end}}' -A | grep -v -e azure-ip-masq-agent -e cloud-node-manager -e coredns -e csi-azure -e konnectivity -e metrics-server -e kube-proxy

For example on my side, I found that aks-nodepool1-70347334-vmss000001 is hosting application pods and that aks-nodepool1-70347334-vmss000001 is hosting only system pods, so I can remove aks-nodepool1-70347334-vmss000001.

Please note this is just a recommendation and it doesn't mean is the best method or an official one.

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I hope this is helpful. If any clarification needed, let me know and I will do my best to answer.

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Thank you!