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Prioritize your high critical applications in AKS

  • April 27, 2021
  • 4 min read
Cloud and Virtualization Architect. Florent is specializing in public, hybrid, and private cloud technologies. He is a Microsoft MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management and an MCSE in Private Cloud.
Cloud and Virtualization Architect. Florent is specializing in public, hybrid, and private cloud technologies. He is a Microsoft MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management and an MCSE in Private Cloud.


When you deploy your AKS cluster, by default, all pods have the same priority, 0, except for default pods that are created during the AKS creation:

Priority, 0, except for default pods

It means that when you do your CA rotation, or you have a crash, pods will restart randomly 😊 first arrive, first serve…

With Pod Priority, you can classify your pods, to give a start priority.

By default, you have 2 class created:

2 class created

Bigger is the value, higher will be the priority.

Let’s start by adding 3 new priorities. Use the following yaml file to create them:

Apply this yaml file. We have now 3 new priorities, that we can use:

Apply yaml file

Now, let’s apply these priorities to pods:

Dev-priority

As you can see, I deployed a lot of pods, with priority, by using in my deployment file the priorityClassName parameter.

Because I can have a maximum of 30 pods per node, I scale down my cluster from 2 nodes to one. I can see that dev pods and pods without priority are not running:

Pods without priority are not running

If I check logs of pods, I can see

Check the logs of pods

As you can see, it works fine. Don’t forget to apply this great feature in your AKS environment.

You can also test this feature, by following this article: Kubernetes Operations: Prioritize Workload in Overcommitted Clusters (microsoft.com)

Hey! Found Florent’s insights useful? Looking for a cost-effective, high-performance, and easy-to-use hyperconverged platform?
Taras Shved
Taras Shved StarWind HCI Appliance Product Manager
Look no further! StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA) is a plug-and-play solution that combines compute, storage, networking, and virtualization software into a single easy-to-use hyperconverged platform. It's designed to significantly trim your IT costs and save valuable time. Interested in learning more? Book your StarWind HCA demo now to see it in action!