Tutorial - Scale applications in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
If you followed the previous tutorials, you have a working Kubernetes cluster and Azure Store Front app.
In this tutorial, part six of seven, you scale out the pods in the app, try pod autoscaling, and scale the number of Azure VM nodes to change the cluster's capacity for hosting workloads. You learn how to:
- Scale the Kubernetes nodes.
- Manually scale Kubernetes pods that run your application.
- Configure autoscaling pods that run the app front end.
Before you begin
In previous tutorials, you packaged an application into a container image, uploaded the image to Azure Container Registry, created an AKS cluster, deployed an application, and used Azure Service Bus to redeploy an updated application. If you haven't completed these steps and want to follow along, start with Tutorial 1 - Prepare application for AKS.
This tutorial requires Azure CLI version 2.34.1 or later. Run az --version
to find the version. If you need to install or upgrade, see Install Azure CLI.
Manually scale pods
View the pods in your cluster using the
kubectl get
command.kubectl get pods
The following example output shows the pods running the Azure Store Front app:
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE order-service-848767080-tf34m 1/1 Running 0 31m product-service-4019737227-2q2qz 1/1 Running 0 31m store-front-2606967446-2q2qz 1/1 Running 0 31m
Manually change the number of pods in the store-front deployment using the
kubectl scale
command.kubectl scale --replicas=5 deployment.apps/store-front
Verify the additional pods were created using the
kubectl get pods
command.kubectl get pods
The following example output shows the additional pods running the Azure Store Front app:
READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE store-front-2606967446-2q2qzc 1/1 Running 0 15m store-front-3309479140-2hfh0 1/1 Running 0 3m store-front-3309479140-bzt05 1/1 Running 0 3m store-front-3309479140-fvcvm 1/1 Running 0 3m store-front-3309479140-hrbf2 1/1 Running 0 15m store-front-3309479140-qphz8 1/1 Running 0 3m
Autoscale pods
To use the horizontal pod autoscaler, all containers must have defined CPU requests and limits, and pods must have specified requests. In the aks-store-quickstart
deployment, the front-end container requests 1m CPU with a limit of 1000m CPU.
These resource requests and limits are defined for each container, as shown in the following condensed example YAML:
...
containers:
- name: store-front
image: ghcr.io/azure-samples/aks-store-demo/store-front:latest
ports:
- containerPort: 8080
name: store-front
...
resources:
requests:
cpu: 1m
...
limits:
cpu: 1000m
...
Autoscale pods using a manifest file
Create a manifest file to define the autoscaler behavior and resource limits, as shown in the following condensed example manifest file
aks-store-quickstart-hpa.yaml
:apiVersion: autoscaling/v2 kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler metadata: name: store-front-hpa spec: maxReplicas: 10 # define max replica count minReplicas: 3 # define min replica count scaleTargetRef: apiVersion: apps/v1 kind: Deployment name: store-front metrics: - type: Resource resource: name: cpu target: type: Utilization averageUtilization: 50
Apply the autoscaler manifest file using the
kubectl apply
command.kubectl apply -f aks-store-quickstart-hpa.yaml
Check the status of the autoscaler using the
kubectl get hpa
command.kubectl get hpa
After a few minutes, with minimal load on the Azure Store Front app, the number of pod replicas decreases to three. You can use
kubectl get pods
again to see the unneeded pods being removed.
Note
You can enable the Kubernetes-based Event-Driven Autoscaler (KEDA) AKS add-on to your cluster to drive scaling based on the number of events needing to be processed. For more information, see Enable simplified application autoscaling with the Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling (KEDA) add-on (Preview).
Manually scale AKS nodes
If you created your Kubernetes cluster using the commands in the previous tutorials, your cluster has two nodes. If you want to increase or decrease this amount, you can manually adjust the number of nodes.
The following example increases the number of nodes to three in the Kubernetes cluster named myAKSCluster. The command takes a couple of minutes to complete.
Scale your cluster nodes using the
az aks scale
command.az aks scale --resource-group myResourceGroup --name myAKSCluster --node-count 3
Once the cluster successfully scales, your output will be similar to following example output:
"aadProfile": null, "addonProfiles": null, "agentPoolProfiles": [ { ... "count": 3, "mode": "System", "name": "nodepool1", "osDiskSizeGb": 128, "osDiskType": "Managed", "osType": "Linux", "ports": null, "vmSize": "Standard_DS2_v2", "vnetSubnetId": null ... } ... ]
You can also autoscale the nodes in your cluster. For more information, see Use the cluster autoscaler with node pools.
Next steps
In this tutorial, you used different scaling features in your Kubernetes cluster. You learned how to:
- Manually scale Kubernetes pods that run your application.
- Configure autoscaling pods that run the app front end.
- Manually scale the Kubernetes nodes.
In the next tutorial, you learn how to upgrade Kubernetes in your AKS cluster.
Azure Kubernetes Service