Question

Difficulty: MediumDeploying and Managing Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Clusters and Workloads

A cloud engineer needs to configure a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Standard cluster to execute fault-tolerant, stateless batch processing workloads while minimizing compute expenditure. The cluster control plane and core system workloads must remain stable, while the batch jobs should run on low-cost compute resources that can be reclaimed at any time. Which TWO actions should the engineer perform to implement this operational strategy?

  1. Create a secondary node pool configured with Spot VMs to host the batch processing workloads.Answer
  2. Add node selectors or taints and tolerations to the batch workload deployment manifest to target the Spot VM node pool.Answer
  3. C
    Configure the GKE control plane master nodes to run on Spot VMs to eliminate baseline cluster management fees.
  4. D
    Configure the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) to automatically provision additional Compute Engine virtual machines when batch memory utilization increases.

Answer

To minimize compute costs for fault-tolerant workloads on GKE, the engineer should create a secondary node pool utilizing Spot VMs and configure the batch deployment manifests with node selectors or taints and tolerations to ensure pods are scheduled onto the Spot nodes.
For fault-tolerant, stateless batch workloads, creating a dedicated node pool powered by Spot VMs provides maximum cost efficiency. To ensure batch tasks execute strictly on these nodes and do not disrupt system services, node selectors or taints and tolerations must be defined in the workload deployment specification.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Provision a dedicated Spot VM node pool
A node pool using discounted Spot VMs is added to the existing GKE cluster.
Spot VMs offer steep discounts compared to standard Compute Engine instances and are ideal for fault-tolerant batch workloads.
2
Configure Kubernetes scheduling constraints in the batch workload manifest
Batch pods are targeted specifically to the Spot VM node pool via nodeSelector or taints and tolerations.
Explicit scheduling constraints prevent batch workloads from consuming standard nodes and ensure core system pods remain separated from preemptible infrastructure.

Key Concept

Deploying fault-tolerant workloads using GKE Spot VM node pools and Kubernetes pod scheduling
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