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:

• Create a kubernetes cluster with a pool consisting of 1 small node. This will be your “permanent pool” that you never kill.
• During business hours, add a pool with the number of nodes you need for your application. Deploy your application to that pool.
• At the end of business hours, delete your deployment and then delete the pool.
• Repeat this process every day.

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