Virtual Node Groups (VNGs)
The challenge of running multiple workload types (separate applications, dev/test environments, node groups requiring a GPU AMI, etc…) on the same Kubernetes cluster is applying a unique configuration to each one of the workloads in a heterogeneous environment. When your worker nodes are managed in a standard managed AKS cluster, usually every workload type is managed separately in a different node pool/group.
Virtual Node Groups are abstract objects Ocean uses to manage the multiple underlying nodepools, you can define Virtual Node Groups to allow dinamic configuration and allocation of multiple workload types on the same Ocean Cluster.
VNGs could also be referred to as Launch Specifications.
Use Cases
- Workload separation/Dedicated Nodes
- Nodes with Special Hardware/Multiple node configurations (different networks/OSs/machine types/lifecycle, etc)
In our section we will create a separate VNG to demonstrate how to easily split workloads between two groups of machines. This is usually done for performance, security, and sometimes it helps with further optimizing the cluster’s costs.
In the example we are going to cover specific values of VNGs, VNGs support multiple configurations in each of the Cloud Providers, you can find the full reference in the following links:
Screenshots might be slightly different due to the different versions but the process is similar.