<p>I was playing around with Kubernetes on AWS with t2.medium EC2 instances having 20GB of disk space and one of the nodes ran out of disk space after a few days. It seems to be caused by a combination of Docker images and logs. </p>

<p>From what I've read, Kubernetes has its own Docker GC to manage Docker's disk usage, and log rotation. I'm guessing 20GB is not enough for Kubernetes to self-manage disk usage. What's a safe disk size for a production environment?</p>

<p>When following the standard installation with the GKE as described in the <a href="https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/docs/quickstart" rel="noreferrer">quickstart guide</a> you'll end up with 3 x n1-standard-1 nodes (see <a href="https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/machine-types#standard_machine_types" rel="noreferrer">machine types</a>) with 100 GB of storage per node.</p>

<p>Looking at the nodes right after the cluster creation then gives you these numbers for the diskspace:</p>

<pre><code>$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root       1.2G  455M  767M  38% /
devtmpfs        1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev
tmp             1.9G   24K  1.9G   1% /tmp
run             1.9G  684K  1.9G   1% /run
shmfs           1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1        95G  2.4G   92G   3% /var
/dev/sda8        12M   28K   12M   1% /usr/share/oem
media           1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /media
tmpfs           1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           256K     0  256K   0% /mnt/disks
tmpfs           1.0M  120K  904K  12% /var/lib/cloud
overlayfs       1.0M  124K  900K  13% /etc
</code></pre>

<p>These numbers might give you a starting point, but as others have pointed out already, the rest depends on your specific requirements.</p>
