Manually scaling a machine set | Machine management | OpenShift Container Platform 4.5

Prerequisites
Scaling a machine set manually
The machine set deletion policy

You can add or remove an instance of a machine in a machine set.

If you need to modify aspects of a machine set outside of scaling, see Modifying a machine set.

Prerequisites

If you enabled the cluster-wide proxy and scale up workers not included in networking.machineNetwork[].cidr from the installation configuration, you must add the workers to the Proxy object’s noProxy field to prevent connection issues.

This process is not applicable to clusters where you manually provisioned the machines yourself. You can use the advanced machine management and scaling capabilities only in clusters where the machine API is operational.

Scaling a machine set manually

If you must add or remove an instance of a machine in a machine set, you can manually scale the machine set.

This guidance is relevant to fully automated, installer-provisioned infrastructure installations. Customized, user-provisioned infrastructure installations does not have machine sets.

Prerequisites

Install an OpenShift Container Platform cluster and the oc command line.
Log in to oc as a user with cluster-admin permission.

Procedure

View the machine sets that are in the cluster:
```
$ oc get machinesets -n openshift-machine-api
```
The machine sets are listed in the form of <clusterid>-worker-<aws-region-az>.

Scale the machine set:

$ oc scale --replicas=2 machineset <machineset> -n openshift-machine-api

Or:

$ oc edit machineset <machineset> -n openshift-machine-api

You can scale the machine set up or down. It takes several minutes for the new machines to be available.

The machine set deletion policy

Random, Newest, and Oldest are the three supported deletion options. The default is Random, meaning that random machines are chosen and deleted when scaling machine sets down. The deletion policy can be set according to the use case by modifying the particular machine set:

spec:
  deletePolicy: <delete_policy>
  replicas: <desired_replica_count>

Specific machines can also be prioritized for deletion by adding the annotation machine.openshift.io/cluster-api-delete-machine to the machine of interest, regardless of the deletion policy.

By default, the OpenShift Container Platform router pods are deployed on workers. Because the router is required to access some cluster resources, including the web console, do not scale the worker machine set to 0 unless you first relocate the router pods.

Custom machine sets can be used for use cases requiring that services run on specific nodes and that those services are ignored by the controller when the worker machine sets are scaling down. This prevents service disruption.