Is there a way for stopping the GKE clusters when not in use and restart them when required

Question

I have created a cluster for R&D purpose using n1-standard-8 machines. It is used in day time, Is there any way to stop the cluster during night time or on weekends ?

Answer 1

You can simply set the replicas to 0 in the yaml and it'll effectively turn off the cluster. And, it'd then be a fairly simple matter of scaling it back up the same way. 

So, if you wanted to, you could set up a job to run "kubectl apply -f your-deployment-day.yaml" during the day to start the cluster and kubectl apply -f your-development-night.yaml" to stop it during evening and weekends.

Comments

Hi Sirajul,

The deployment would be applicable for kuberentes objects only(pods,svc,rs), however the question was to stop the nodes/cluster in case of non-use ?

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You can temporarily scale the number of nodes in your cluster down to zero by running:

gcloud container clusters resize $CLUSTER_NAME --num-nodes=0

Then scale it back up later by running that with a non-zero value for the size flag.