Getting Started with kOps on Spot Ocean

Ocean by Spot simplifies infrastructure management for Kubernetes. With robust, container-driven infrastructure auto-scaling and intelligent right-sizing for container resource requirements, operations can literally “set and forget” the underlying cluster.

Ocean seamlessly integrates with your existing instance groups, as a drop-in replacement for AWS Auto Scaling groups, and allows you to streamline and optimize the entire workflow, from initially creating your cluster to managing and optimizing it on an ongoing basis.

Features

• Simplify Cluster Management — Ocean’s Virtual Node Groups make it easy to run different infrastructure in a single cluster, which can span multiple AWS VPC availability zones and subnets for high-availability.

• Container-Driven Autoscaling and Vertical Rightsizing — Auto-detect your container infrastructure requirements so the appropriate instance size or type will always be available. Measure real-time CPU/Memory consumption of your Pods for ongoing resource optimization.

• Cloud-Native Showback — Gain a granular view of your cluster’s cost breakdown (compute and storage) for each and every one of the cluster’s resources such as Namespaces, Deployments, Daemon Sets, Jobs, and Pods.

• Optimized Pricing and Utilization — Ocean not only intelligently leverages Spot Instances and reserved capacity to reduce costs, but also eliminates underutilized instances with container-driven autoscaling and advanced bin-packing.

Prerequisites

Make sure you have installed kOps and installed kubectl.

Setup your environment

Spot

Generate your credentials here. If you are not a Spot Ocean user, sign up for free here. For further information, please checkout our Spot API guide, available on the Spot Help Center website.

To use environment variables, run:

export SPOTINST_TOKEN=<spotinst_token>
export SPOTINST_ACCOUNT=<spotinst_account>

To use credentials file, run the spotctl configure command:

spotctl configure
? Enter your access token [? for help] **********************************
? Select your default account  [Use arrows to move, ? for more help]
> act-01234567 (prod)
  act-0abcdefg (dev)

Or, manually create an INI formatted file like this:

[default]
token   = <spotinst_token>
account = <spotinst_account>

and place it in:

• Unix/Linux/macOS:

  ~/.spotinst/credentials

• Windows:

  %UserProfile%\.spotinst\credentials

AWS

Make sure to set up a dedicated IAM user, DNS records and cluster state storage. Please refer to setup your environment for further details.

Feature Flags

Creating a Cluster

You can add an Ocean instance group to new or existing clusters. To create a new cluster with a Ocean instance groups, run:

# configure the feature flags
export KOPS_FEATURE_FLAGS="Spotinst,SpotinstOcean,SpotinstOceanTemplate"
# create the cluster
kops create cluster --zones=us-west-2a example

Note

It’s possible to have a cluster with both Ocean-managed and unmanaged instance groups.

# configure the feature flags
export KOPS_FEATURE_FLAGS="Spotinst,SpotinstOcean,SpotinstHybrid"
# create the instance groups
kops create -f instancegroups.yaml

# instancegroups.yaml
# A cluster with both Ocean-managed and unmanaged instance groups.
---
# Use Ocean in hybrid mode.
apiVersion: kops.k8s.io/v1alpha2
kind: InstanceGroup
metadata:
  labels:
    kops.k8s.io/cluster: "example"
    spotinst.io/hybrid: "true"
  ...
---
# Use AWS Auto Scaling group.
apiVersion: kops.k8s.io/v1alpha2
kind: InstanceGroup
metadata:
  labels:
    kops.k8s.io/cluster: "example"
  ...

Creating an Instance Group

To create a new instance group, run:

# configure the feature flags
export KOPS_FEATURE_FLAGS="Spotinst,SpotinstOcean,SpotinstOceanTemplate"
# create the instance group
kops create instancegroup --role=node --name=example

To create a new instance group and have more control over the configuration, a config file can be used.

# instancegroup.yaml
# An instance group with Ocean configuration.
---
apiVersion: kops.k8s.io/v1alpha2
kind: InstanceGroup
metadata:
  labels:
    kops.k8s.io/cluster: "example"
    spotinst.io/spot-percentage: "90"
  spec:
    image: 099720109477/ubuntu/images/hvm-ssd/ubuntu-focal-20.04-amd64-server-20221206
    instanceMetadata:
      httpPutResponseHopLimit: 1
      httpTokens: required
    machineType: m5.large
    #define the max and min numbers of instances in the group
    maxSize: 3
    minSize: 1
    role: Node
    subnets:
      - us-west-2b

InstanceGroup Metadata Labels

Cluster Metadata Labels

# cluster.yaml
# A Cluster with Ocean configuration.
---
apiVersion: kops.k8s.io/v1alpha2
kind: Cluster
metadata:
  name: "example"
  labels:
    spotinst.io/strategy-cluster-spread-nodes-by: "count"
    spotinst.io/strategy-cluster-orientation-availability-vs-cost: "balanced"    
    spotinst.io/resource-tag-specification-volumes: "true"
  ...

|| Label | Description | Default | |—-|————————————————————————————————————————————|—-| | spotinst.io/strategy-cluster-spread-nodes-by | Specify how Ocean will spread the nodes across markets by this value [vcpu,count]. | count | | spotinst.io/strategy-cluster-orientation-availability-vs-cost | Specify approach [cost,balanced,cheapest] that Ocean takes while launching nodes. | balanced | | spotinst.io/resource-tag-specification-volumes | Specify if Volume resources will be tagged with Virtual Node Group tags or Ocean tags. | false |

Documentation

If you’re new to Spot and want to get started, please checkout our Getting Started guide, available on the Spot Documentation website.

Getting Help

Please use these community resources for getting help:

• Join our Spot community on Slack.
• Open a GitHub issue.
• Ask a question on Stack Overflow and tag it with spot-ocean.