How to size Azure Kubernetes for Elastic deployment

[jthoni (John T)]

We are currently running a 50 node cluster (with 40 data nodes) on VMs in Azure. I am looking into converting to running in AKS. I am having trouble figuring out how to determine the resources I need in my AKS cluster to host the ES nodes. My cluster is current running on Standard_E8s_v3 machines (8 cpu / 64 gb). I am not clear on how to calculate how many AKS nodes I need to be able to run a 50 ES nodes. Is it a 1:1 mapping (i.e., I would need 50 AKS nodes), or is running in containers more efficient and each ES node won't need full utilization of all 8 cores, etc.?

Thanks!

[michael.morello]

@jthoni

is running in containers more efficient and each ES node won't need full utilization of all 8 cores, etc.?

Unfortunately I think it is hard to give an accurate answer. It depends on the underlying implementations of the hypervisor and the container runtime. Having a 1:1 mapping seems to be a good start, but I guess that you'll have to do some tests to understand if there are significant performance discrepancies between VMs and containers.