Cloud-Native Microservices With Kubernetes - 2nd Edition

Upgrading Node Pools

Whether you’re using a managed Kubernetes service or running your own cluster, you may need to upgrade a node pool—often to change machine type or capacity.

As a reminder, a node pool is a group of nodes that share the same configuration. For example, on DigitalOcean, you might have one pool with three nodes of type s-1vcpu-2gb and another with three nodes of type s-2vcpu-4gb.

The general approach is to create a new node pool with the desired configuration, migrate workloads to it by draining the old pool’s nodes, then delete the old pool.

The 3 steps are detailed below.

1 - Create the New Node Pool

Suppose we create a new pool with three s-2vcpu-4gb nodes:

doctl kubernetes cluster node-pool \
  create |