Node Groups

Configure node groups and optimize compute costs for your Porter cluster

Porter provides flexible options for managing compute resources in your cluster. You can add custom node groups for specialized workloads or enable cost optimization to reduce infrastructure spend.

Creating a Custom Node Group

1. Navigate to Infrastructure

   From your Porter dashboard, click on the Infrastructure tab in the left sidebar.

2. Select your cluster

   Click on Cluster to view your cluster configuration and node groups.

3. Add a node group

   Click Add an additional node group to open the node group configuration panel.

4. Configure the node group

   Cost Optimization

   Cost Optimization for Node Groups

   Set your maximum CPU cores limit to prevent unexpected scaling. This helps prevent unexpected cost increases by setting a cap.

   

   Limitations

   The following node group configurations should continue using fixed instance types until we support cost optimization for them:

   • GPU instances (e.g., instances with NVIDIA GPUs)
   • Spot instances
   • Instances in public subnets
   • Instances with specialized hardware requirements

   Fixed Node Groups

   Fixed Node Groups

   Fixed node groups uses a specific fixed instance type approach. Applications built on this will only be scheduled on the exact instance type. This gives you more control, but has the limitation of over-provisioning certain resources if configured incorrectly.

   

   Configure your node group with the following settings:

   Setting	Description
   Instance type	The machine type for nodes in this group
   Minimum nodes	The minimum number of nodes to maintain (set to 0 for scale-to-zero)
   Maximum nodes	The upper limit for autoscaling

   Choose instance types based on your workload requirements. For GPU workloads, create a second node group and select instances with GPU support (e.g., g4dn.xlarge on AWS, Standard_NC4as_T4_v3 on Azure, g2-standard-4 on GCP).

   Health Checks Required: For production applications, ensure proper health checks are configured before scheduling them on cost-optimized node groups. This ensures your applications can be safely rescheduled on new nodes without causing any disruption as nodes are reshuffled.

5. Save and apply

   Click Save to create the node group. Porter will provision the new nodes in your cluster. This may take a few minutes.

Assigning Workloads

Once your custom node group is created, you can assign applications to run on it:

1. Navigate to your application in the Porter dashboard
2. Go to the Services tab
3. Click the service you want to assign
4. Under General, find the Node group selector
5. Select your custom node group from the dropdown
6. Save and redeploy your application

Deleting a Node Group

To remove a custom node group:

1. First, migrate any workloads running on the node group to another node group
2. Navigate to Infrastructure → Cluster
3. Find the node group you want to delete
4. Click the delete icon and confirm

Ensure no workloads are scheduled on the node group before deleting. Workloads will be disrupted if their node group is removed.