Normally the number of nodes in a cluster is controlled by the the value `NUM_NODES` in the platform-specific `config-default.sh` file (for example, see [GCE's `config-default.sh`](http://releases.k8s.io/HEAD/cluster/gce/config-default.sh)).
Simply changing that value to something very large, however, may cause the setup script to fail for many cloud providers. A GCE deployment, for example, will run in to quota issues and fail to bring the cluster up.
* Gating the setup script so that it brings up new node VMs in smaller batches with waits in between, because some cloud providers rate limit the creation of VMs.
To prevent memory leaks or other resource issues in [cluster addons](../../cluster/addons/) from consuming all the resources available on a node, Kubernetes sets resource limits on addon containers to limit the CPU and Memory resources they can consume (See PR [#10653](http://pr.k8s.io/10653/files) and [#10778](http://pr.k8s.io/10778/files)).
These limits, however, are based on data collected from addons running on 4-node clusters (see [#10335](http://issue.k8s.io/10335#issuecomment-117861225)). The addons consume a lot more resources when running on large deployment clusters (see [#5880](http://issue.k8s.io/5880#issuecomment-113984085)). So, if a large cluster is deployed without adjusting these values, the addons may continuously get killed because they keep hitting the limits.
To avoid running into cluster addon resource issues, when creating a cluster with many nodes, consider the following:
* Scale memory and CPU limits for each of the following addons, if used, along with the size of cluster (there is one replica of each handling the entire cluster so memory and CPU usage tends to grow proportionally with size/load on cluster):
* Scale number of replicas for the following addons, if used, along with the size of cluster (there are multiple replicas of each so increasing replicas should help handle increased load, but, since load per replica also increases slightly, also consider increasing CPU/memory limits):
* Increase memory and CPU limits slightly for each of the following addons, if used, along with the size of cluster (there is one replica per node but CPU/memory usage increases slightly along with cluster load/size as well):
For directions on how to detect if addon containers are hitting resource limits, see the [Troubleshooting section of Compute Resources](../user-guide/compute-resources.md#troubleshooting).
