Adding a node pool to your Domino cluster


Making a new node group available to Domino is as simple as adding new Kubernetes worker nodes with a distinct label. You can then reference the value of that label when creating new hardware tiers to configure Domino to assign executions to those nodes.

See below for an example of creating a scalable node pool in EKS.

Creating a scalable node pool in EKS

This example shows how to create a new node group with eksctl and expose it to the cluster autoscaler as a labeled Domino node pool.

  1. Create a new-nodegroup.yaml file like the one below, and configure it with the properties you want the new group to have. All values shown with a $ are variables that you should modify.

    kind: ClusterConfig
      name: $CLUSTER_NAME
      region: $CLUSTER_REGION
      - name: $GROUP_NAME # this can be any name you choose, it will be part of the ASG and template name
        instanceType: $AWS_INSTANCE_TYPE
        minSize: $DMINIMUM_GROUP_SIZE
        volumeSize: 400 # important to allow for image caching on Domino workers
        availabilityZones: ["$YOUR_CHOICE"] # this should be the same AZ (or the same multiple AZ's) as your other node pools
          "": "$NODE_POOL_NAME" # this is the name you'll reference from Domino
          # "": "true" # uncomment this line if this pool uses a GPU instance type
          "": "$NODE_POOL_NAME"

    Note that the AWS tag with key is important for exposing the group to your cluster autoscaler.

    Note also that you cannot have compute node pools in separate, isolated AZ’s as this creates volume affinity errors.

  2. Once your configuration file describes the group you want to create, run eksctl create nodegroup --config-file=new-nodegroup.yaml.

  3. Take the names of the resulting ASG and add them to the autoscaling.groups section of your domino.yml installer configuration.

  4. Run the Domino installer to update the autoscaler.

  5. Create a new hardware tier in Domino that references the new labels.

When finished, you can start Domino executions that use the new Hardware Tier and those executions will be assigned to nodes in the new group, which will be scaled as configured by the cluster autoscaler.