Test environments

Creating a workload cluster for test purposes

The dev portal provides an easy form to create a test cluster. Please give this one a try. It’s in an early stage as of March 2025, so Honeybadger would love to get your feedback.

Create a test cluster

Apart from that, you can also use Happa (where supported) or kubectl-gs.

Avoid any avoidable cost

Create test clusters in a way so that they are as cheap as possible and as expensive as necessary.

• Use spot instances (AWS only)
• Use only one availability zone if possible. (Cross AZ traffic costs extra.)
• Use the cheapest possible instance type. On AWS, use c5.xlarge.
• Minimize the amount of worker nodes. Set the min number of worker nodes to 1 instead of 3 (AWS and Azure only).
• Delete your test cluster as soon as you don’t need it any more.
• On AWS vintage:
  • Use a single control plane node if possible

Label the cluster

Note: This is not possible on KVM.

To be able to keep a test cluster for more than 4 hours, add the following labels:

• creator: The value should be your Slack user name. With this label, others in the company can address you in case of an issue.
• keep-until: As a value, set an ISO date string (format: YYYY-MM-DD) for the last day this cluster should still keep running. This is to be evaluated against UTC date/time.
• Your cluster wont’ be deleted until you remove the annotation:

annotations:
  alpha.giantswarm.io/ignore-cluster-deletion: "true"

Clusters are deleted automatically by cluster-cleaner under the following conditions:

• the cluster is older than 4 hours
• AND ( the keep-until label has a date in the past, or the label is not set)
• AND ( the alpha.giantswarm.io/ignore-cluster-deletion annotation is set to false or not set )

Also anyone is allowed to delete these clusters without notice.

Leave the environment better than you found it

• If you replaced any management cluster components: Once you are done with testing, redeploy the original versions.
• Check the dedicated alert channels for the installation you tested on and make sure there is nothing broken.
• In case the test environment is broken or unusable, try to fix it, then escalate the situation to a KaaS team.