3 years ago

Category: Database, Microsoft, Kubernetes

The September release of Microsoft’s Azure Kubernetes Service includes an interesting new feature: you can stop a cluster when you don’t need it and restart it again when you do — the way you can stop a VM, pause a video or hibernate a laptop. Scaling a cluster to zero still leaves the system pool running (and running up a bill); turning it off stops the control plane and agent nodes completely so there’s no cost, but you don’t need to create the cluster and reinstall images when you want the cluster back.

Instead of making them write a script to delete a cluster and create a cluster, just like you’d stop and start a VM rather than deleting and recreating a VM, you can stop the cluster, and then restart it at a later date with all of the state and everything that was already in there.”

So, when you stop a cluster, you’re taking the state of the etcd database, and you’re preserving it out to file.

So, you could stop your cluster during that time and then when the first upload comes in, you could start up your cluster, and just start again, with everything that you need already there so it would immediately go pick up the files, handle the event and do the transcoding.”