Add labels to cluster nodes

Add labels to cluster nodes

With MKE, you can add labels to your nodes. Labels are metadata that describe the node, like its role (development, QA, production), its region (US, EU, APAC), or the kind of disk (HDD, SSD). Once you have labeled your nodes, you can add deployment constraints to your services, to ensure they are scheduled on a node with a specific label.

For example, you can apply labels based on their role in the development lifecycle, or the hardware resources they have.

Don’t create labels for authorization and permissions to resources. Instead, use resource sets, either MKE collections or Kubernetes namespaces, to organize access to your cluster.

Apply labels to a node

In this example, we’ll apply the ssd label to a node. Next, we’ll deploy a service with a deployment constraint to make sure the service is always scheduled to run on a node that has the ssd label.

  1. Log in with administrator credentials in the MKE web interface.
  2. Select Nodes in the left-hand navigation menu.
  3. In the nodes list, select the node to which you want to apply labels.
  4. In the details pane, select the edit node icon in the upper-right corner to edit the node.
  5. In the Edit Node page, scroll down to the Labels section.
  6. Select Add Label.
  7. Add a label with the key disk and a value of ssd.
  8. Click Save then dismiss the Edit Node page.
  9. In the node’s details pane, select Labels to view the labels that are applied to the node.

You can also do this from the CLI by running:

docker node update --label-add <key>=<value> <node-id>

Deploy a service with constraints

When deploying a service, you can specify constraints, so that the service gets scheduled only on a node that has a label that fulfills all of the constraints you specify.

In this example, when users deploy a service, they can add a constraint for the service to be scheduled only on nodes that have SSD storage: node.labels.disk == ssd.

  1. Navigate to the Stacks page.

  2. Name the new stack “wordpress”.

  3. Under Orchestrator Mode, select Swarm Services.

  4. In the docker-compose.yml editor, paste the following stack file.

    version: "3.1"
    
    services:
      db:
        image: mysql:5.7
        deploy:
          placement:
            constraints:
              - node.labels.disk == ssd
          restart_policy:
            condition: on-failure
        networks:
          - wordpress-net
        environment:
          MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: wordpress
          MYSQL_DATABASE: wordpress
          MYSQL_USER: wordpress
          MYSQL_PASSWORD: wordpress
      wordpress:
        depends_on:
          - db
        image: wordpress:latest
        deploy:
          replicas: 1
          placement:
            constraints:
              - node.labels.disk == ssd
          restart_policy:
            condition: on-failure
            max_attempts: 3
        networks:
          - wordpress-net
        ports:
          - "8000:80"
        environment:
          WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: db:3306
          WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: wordpress
    
    networks:
      wordpress-net:
    
  5. Click Create to deploy the stack, and when the stack deploys, click Done.

  6. Navigate to the Nodes page, and click the node that has the disk label. In the details pane, click the Inspect Resource drop-down menu and select Containers.

  7. Dismiss the filter and navigate to the Nodes page.

  8. Click a node that doesn’t have the disk label. In the details pane, click the Inspect Resource drop-down menu and select Containers. There are no WordPress containers scheduled on the node. Dismiss the filter.

Add a constraint to a service by using the MKE web UI

You can declare the deployment constraints in your docker-compose.yml file or when you’re creating a stack. Also, you can apply them when you’re creating a service.

To check if a service has deployment constraints, navigate to the Services page and choose the service that you want to check. In the details pane, click Constraints to list the constraint labels.

To edit the constraints on the service, click Configure and select Details to open the Update Service page. Click Scheduling to view the constraints.

You can add or remove deployment constraints on this page.