Handling of System Reserved in Azure Kubernetes Service nodes

Question

Hello team,

As per the node reservations documentation, we are able to set only kube-reserved. There is no mention about setting system-reserved. Does this mean the user pods can starve your system daemons as the system-reserved is not set? How does azure ensures that the system daemons work without interruption when there is more demand from the user pods?

Answer 1

Hi Sathyanarayanan Saravanamuthu,
Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Q&A forum.

In Azure Kubernetes Service, the kube-reserved setting is available to allocate resources specifically for Kubernetes system components, but there is no direct configuration for system-reserved. This means that while AKS does not provide a system-reserved option, Azure infrastructure management ensures that essential system processes continue to function properly even under high demand from user pods.

If you're running applications that need a lot of resources, you might worry that a single node could become overloaded, leading to insufficient resources for other tasks. In such cases, you can to add more nodes to your cluster to distribute the load effectively. Additionally, using resource requests and limits for your pods can help manage how resources are allocated and prevent any single pod from consuming too many resources. Keep observing on resources how much you’re using and add more nodes to your cluster when necessary. This will help keep things stable and make sure that everything, including important system tasks, keeps running smoothly.

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