When we provision Kubernetes clusters, we setup two, sometimes three, nodepools:
corethat contains ‘always-on’ services such as the hub itself;notebookswhere users’ notebook servers are created;and optionally,
daskwhere dask pods are created for dask-enabled hubs.
By default, we set the notebook and dask nodepools to scale to zero in order to maximise the cost-effieciency of the cluster.
The drawback of this is that the first user to trigger a nodepool scale-up event is usually left waiting a long time for their server.
There are specific scenarios where we would like to avoid this, such as a hub we are running for a specific event and we can expect a certain number of users and a certain time.
In these scenarios, we often scale-up the nodepools manually before the event so users are not left waiting long periods for their servers.
These sections document how to manually scale a nodepool for each cloud provider.