QuickStart Guide for Microsoft AKS

This quickstart guide will help you get the slurm-operator running and deploy Slurm clusters to AKS.

Setup

Setup a resource group on AKS 

az group create --name slinky --location westus2

Setup a cluster on AKS 

az aks create \
    --resource-group slinky \
    --name slinky \
    --location westus2 \
    --node-vm-size Standard_D2s_v3

Setup kubectl to point to your new cluster. 

az aks get-credentials --resource-group slinky --name slinky

Pre-Requisites

Install the pre-requisite helm charts. 

helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo add kedacore https://kedacore.github.io/charts
helm repo add metrics-server https://kubernetes-sigs.github.io/metrics-server/
helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
helm repo add jetstack https://charts.jetstack.io
helm repo update
helm install cert-manager jetstack/cert-manager \
	--namespace cert-manager --create-namespace --set crds.enabled=true
helm install prometheus prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack \
    --namespace prometheus --create-namespace --set installCRDs=true

Slurm Operator

Download values and install the slurm-operator. You will need to update the operator and webhook repository values to point to the desired container repository.

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SlinkyProject/slurm-operator/refs/heads/main/helm/slurm-operator/values.yaml \
    -o values-operator.yaml

Make sure you are authenticated and the proper role is assigned to pull your images.

az acr login -n slinky

az aks show \
    --resource-group slinky \
    --name slinky \
    --query identityProfile.kubeletidentity.clientId \
    -o tsv

az role assignment create --assignee <clientId from above> \
     --role AcrPull \
     --scope $(az acr show --name slinky --query id -o tsv)

helm install slurm-operator \
    -f values-operator.yaml \
    --namespace=slinky \
    --create-namespace \
    helm/slurm-operator

Make sure the cluster deployed successfully with: 

kubectl --namespace=slinky get pods

Output should be similar to: 

NAME                                      READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
slurm-operator-7444c844d5-dpr5h           1/1     Running   0          5m00s
slurm-operator-webhook-6fd8d7857d-zcvqh   1/1     Running   0          5m00s

Slurm Cluster

Download values and install a Slurm cluster.

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SlinkyProject/slurm-operator/refs/heads/main/helm/slurm/values.yaml \
    -o values-slurm.yaml

helm install slurm \
    -f values-slurm.yaml \
    --namespace=slurm \
    --create-namespace \
    helm/slurm

By default the values-slurm.yaml file uses standard for controller.persistence.storageClass and mariadb.primary.persistence.storageClass. You will need to update this value to default to use AKS’s default storageClass.

Make sure the slurm cluster deployed successfully with: 

kubectl --namespace=slurm get pods

Output should be similar to: 

NAME                              READY   STATUS    RESTARTS       AGE
slurm-accounting-0                1/1     Running   0              5m00s
slurm-compute-debug-l4bd2         1/1     Running   0              5m00s
slurm-controller-0                2/2     Running   0              5m00s
slurm-exporter-7b44b6d856-d86q5   1/1     Running   0              5m00s
slurm-mariadb-0                   1/1     Running   0              5m00s
slurm-restapi-5f75db85d9-67gpl    1/1     Running   0              5m00s

Testing

To test Slurm functionality, connect to the controller to use Slurm client commands:

kubectl --namespace=slurm exec \
    -it statefulsets/slurm-controller -- bash --login

On the controller pod (e.g. host slurm@slurm-controller-0), run the following commands to quickly test Slurm is functioning: 

sinfo
srun hostname
sbatch --wrap="sleep 60"
squeue

See Slurm Commands for more details on how to interact with Slurm.