Adapt apps for mixed-OS Kubernetes clusters using node selectors or taints and tolerations in AKS hybrid
Applies to: AKS on Azure Stack HCI, AKS on Windows Server
AKS hybrid enables you to run Kubernetes clusters with both Linux and Windows nodes, but you'll need to make small edits to your apps for use in these mixed-OS clusters. In this how-to guide, you'll learn how to ensure your application gets scheduled on the right host OS using either node selectors or taints and tolerations.
This how-to guide assumes a basic understanding of Kubernetes concepts. For more information, see Kubernetes core concepts for AKS hybrid.
Node selectors
A Node Selector is a simple field in the pod specification YAML that constrains pods to only be scheduled onto healthy nodes matching the operating system. In your pod specification YAML, specify a nodeSelector - Windows or Linux, as shown in the examples below.
kubernetes.io/os = Windows
or,
kubernetes.io/os = Linux
For more information on nodeSelectors, visit node selectors.
Taints and tolerations
Taints and tolerations work together to ensure that pods aren't scheduled on nodes unintentionally. A node can be "tainted" not to accept pods that don't explicitly tolerate its taint through a "toleration" in the pod specification YAML.
Windows OS nodes in AKS hybrid can be tainted when created with the New-AksHciNodePool command or the New-AksHciCluster command. You can also use these commands to taint Linux OS nodes. The following example taints Windows nodes.
Apply taint to new cluster
If you are also creating a new cluster, run the following command to create a Windows node pool with a taint. If you have an existing cluster that you want to add a node pool with a taint to, go to the next example, which uses the New-AksHciNodePool command.
New-AksHciCluster -name mycluster -nodePoolName taintnp -nodeCount 1 -osType Windows -osSku Windows2022 -taints sku=Windows:NoSchedule
Add tainted node pool to existing cluster
To add a tainted node pool to an existing cluster, run the following command:
New-AksHciNodePool -clusterName <cluster-name> -nodePoolNAme taintnp -count 1 -osType Windows -osSku Windows2022 -taints sku=Windows:NoSchedule
To check that the node pool was successfully deployed with the taint, run the following command:
Get-AksHciNodePool -clusterName <cluster-name> -name taintnp
Example output
Status : {Phase, Details}
ClusterName : mycluster
NodePoolName : taintnp
Version : v1.20.7-kvapkg.1
OsType : Windows
NodeCount : 0
VmSize : Standard_K8S3_v1
Phase : Deployed
Taints : {sku=Windows:NoSchedule}
Specify toleration for pod
You specify a toleration for a pod in the pod specification YAML. The following toleration "matches" the taint created by the kubectl taint line shown above. The result is that a pod with the toleration will be able to schedule onto the tainted nodes.
tolerations:
- key: node.kubernetes.io/os
operator: Equal
value: Windows
effect: NoSchedule
The steps in this section work well if you're in control of the pod spec that you're deploying. However, in some cases, users have a pre-existing large number of deployments for Linux containers, as well as an ecosystem of common configurations, such as community Helm charts. You won't have access to the pod spec unless you want to download and edit the chart.
If you deploy these Helm charts to a mixed cluster environment with both Linux and Windows worker nodes, your application pods will fail with the error "ImagePullBackOff" - for example:
C:\>kubectl get pods
NAMESPACE NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
default nginx-deployment-558fc78868-795dp 0/1 ImagePullBackOff 0 6m24s
default nginx-deployment-6b474476c4-gpb77 0/1 ImagePullBackOff 0 11m
In this instance, you should look at using taints to help with this: Windows Server nodes can be tainted with the following key-value pair: node.kubernetes.io/os=windows:NoSchedule
For more information on taints and tolerations, visit Taints and Tolerations.
Next steps
In this how-to guide, you learned how to add node selectors or taints and tolerations to your Kubernetes clusters using kubectl. Next, you can: