Does scale down deployments outside business hours help saving on billing?
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×It depends on what you’re scaling down. As @bobbyiliev said, if you’re reducing the number of nodes in your cluster, that will but down your bill.
But if you’re just reducing the number of replicas of your deployment (which is what it sounds like you’re implying), then the number of nodes (virtual machines) that you’re running is the same, and it will NOT bring your bill down.
I’m not sure if it’s possible to have a zero-node cluster. But I think you should always keep at least one node in your cluster. It could be the cheapest possible VM ($10/month).
You could try organizing your cluster as follows:
To be honest, unless you really have a very large workload during the day and then no workload during the night, this is probably not worth the effort of saving $10/$20 a month.
If you DO have such a large workload, I’d be very curious to learn more about it.
You might just be using the wrong tool for the job, and something other than Kubernetes will be more effective.
Hi there @xenon90,
I’ve just tried creating a new Kubernetes cluster and tried to set the nodes to 0 and I can confirm that it is not possible to have 0 nodes. Also, the recommended minimum is 2 nodes, that way if one of the nodes goes down you still would have a running instance.
In addition to what @nabsul mentioned, what I could also suggest is rather than doing this manually you could enable the Cluster Autoscaler for a DigitalOcean Kubernetes Cluster.
You could take a look at the documentation here on how to do that:
https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/kubernetes/how-to/autoscale/
Hope that this helps!
Regards,
Bobby
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