How can I add a new node into existing kubernetes cluster with a different machine type

Question

How do I add a new node in a GKE cluster with a different machine type. I am getting the following error:

ERROR: (gcloud.compute.instance-groups.managed.resize) unrecognized arguments: --machine-type n1-standard-8

How do I resolve it?

Answer 1

You can work around the single machine-type restriction by creating a new instance group with a (modified) copy of GKE's instance template.

Note that later you may need to manually upgrade that instance group (instead of using GKE's Node Upgrade API).