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Production environment

Create a production-quality Kubernetes cluster

A production-quality Kubernetes cluster requires planning and preparation. If your Kubernetes cluster is to run critical workloads, it must be configured to be resilient. This page explains steps you can take to set up a production-ready cluster, or to promote an existing cluster for production use. If you're already familiar with production setup and want the links, skip to What's next.

Production considerations

Typically, a production Kubernetes cluster environment has more requirements than a personal learning, development, or test environment Kubernetes. A production environment may require secure access by many users, consistent availability, and the resources to adapt to changing demands.

As you decide where you want your production Kubernetes environment to live (on premises or in a cloud) and the amount of management you want to take on or hand to others, consider how your requirements for a Kubernetes cluster are influenced by the following issues:

  • Availability: A single-machine Kubernetes learning environment has a single point of failure. Creating a highly available cluster means considering:

    • Separating the control plane from the worker nodes.
    • Replicating the control plane components on multiple nodes.
    • Load balancing traffic to the cluster’s API server.
    • Having enough worker nodes available, or able to quickly become available, as changing workloads warrant it.

  • Scale: If you expect your production Kubernetes environment to receive a stable amount of demand, you might be able to set up for the capacity you need and be done. However, if you expect demand to grow over time or change dramatically based on things like season or special events, you need to plan how to scale to relieve increased pressure from more requests to the control plane and worker nodes or scale down to reduce unused resources.

  • Security and access management: You have full admin privileges on your own Kubernetes learning cluster. But shared clusters with important workloads, and more than one or two users, require a more refined approach to who and what can access cluster resources. You can use role-based access control (RBAC) and other security mechanisms to make sure that users and workloads can get access to the resources they need, while keeping workloads, and the cluster itself, secure. You can set limits on the resources that users and workloads can access by managing policies and container resources.

Before building a Kubernetes production environment on your own, consider handing off some or all of this job to Turnkey Cloud Solutions providers or other Kubernetes Partners. Options include:

  • Serverless: Just run workloads on third-party equipment without managing a cluster at all. You will be charged for things like CPU usage, memory, and disk requests.
  • Managed control plane: Let the provider manage the scale and availability of the cluster's control plane, as well as handle patches and upgrades.
  • Managed worker nodes: Configure pools of nodes to meet your needs, then the provider makes sure those nodes are available and ready to implement upgrades when needed.
  • Integration: There are providers that integrate Kubernetes with other services you may need, such as storage, container registries, authentication methods, and development tools.

Whether you build a production Kubernetes cluster yourself or work with partners, review the following sections to evaluate your needs as they relate to your cluster’s control plane, worker nodes, user access, and workload resources.

Production cluster setup

In a production-quality Kubernetes cluster, the control plane manages the cluster from services that can be spread across multiple computers in different ways. Each worker node, however, represents a single entity that is configured to run Kubernetes pods.

Production control plane

The simplest Kubernetes cluster has the entire control plane and worker node services running on the same machine. You can grow that environment by adding worker nodes, as reflected in the diagram illustrated in Kubernetes Components. If the cluster is meant to be available for a short period of time, or can be discarded if something goes seriously wrong, this might meet your needs.

If you need a more permanent, highly available cluster, however, you should consider ways of extending the control plane. By design, one-machine control plane services running on a single machine are not highly available. If keeping the cluster up and running and ensuring that it can be repaired if something goes wrong is important, consider these steps:

  • Choose deployment tools: You can deploy a control plane using tools such as kubeadm, kops, and kubespray. See Installing Kubernetes with deployment tools to learn tips for production-quality deployments using each of those deployment methods. Different Container Runtimes are available to use with your deployments.
  • Manage certificates: Secure communications between control plane services are implemented using certificates. Certificates are automatically generated during deployment or you can generate them using your own certificate authority. See PKI certificates and requirements for details.
  • Configure load balancer for apiserver: Configure a load balancer to distribute external API requests to the apiserver service instances running on different nodes. See Create an External Load Balancer for details.
  • Separate and backup etcd service: The etcd services can either run on the same machines as other control plane services or run on separate machines, for extra security and availability. Because etcd stores cluster configuration data, backing up the etcd database should be done regularly to ensure that you can repair that database if needed. See the etcd FAQ for details on configuring and using etcd. See Operating etcd clusters for Kubernetes and Set up a High Availability etcd cluster with kubeadm for details.
  • Create multiple control plane systems: For high availability, the control plane should not be limited to a single machine. If the control plane services are run by an init service (such as systemd), each service should run on at least three machines. However, running control plane services as pods in Kubernetes ensures that the replicated number of services that you request will always be available. The scheduler should be fault tolerant, but not highly available. Some deployment tools set up Raft consensus algorithm to do leader election of Kubernetes services. If the primary goes away, another service elects itself and take over.
  • Span multiple zones: If keeping your cluster available at all times is critical, consider creating a cluster that runs across multiple data centers, referred to as zones in cloud environments. Groups of zones are referred to as regions. By spreading a cluster across multiple zones in the same region, it can improve the chances that your cluster will continue to function even if one zone becomes unavailable. See Running in multiple zones for details.
  • Manage on-going features: If you plan to keep your cluster over time, there are tasks you need to do to maintain its health and security. For example, if you installed with kubeadm, there are instructions to help you with Certificate Management and Upgrading kubeadm clusters. See Administer a Cluster for a longer list of Kubernetes administrative tasks.

To learn about available options when you run control plane services, see kube-apiserver, kube-controller-manager, and kube-scheduler component pages. For highly available control plane examples, see Options for Highly Available topology, Creating Highly Available clusters with kubeadm, and Operating etcd clusters for Kubernetes. See Backing up an etcd cluster for information on making an etcd backup plan.

Production worker nodes

Production-quality workloads need to be resilient and anything they rely on needs to be resilient (such as CoreDNS). Whether you manage your own control plane or have a cloud provider do it for you, you still need to consider how you want to manage your worker nodes (also referred to simply as nodes).

  • Configure nodes: Nodes can be physical or virtual machines. If you want to create and manage your own nodes, you can install a supported operating system, then add and run the appropriate Node services. Consider:
    • The demands of your workloads when you set up nodes by having appropriate memory, CPU, and disk speed and storage capacity available.
    • Whether generic computer systems will do or you have workloads that need GPU processors, Windows nodes, or VM isolation.
  • Validate nodes: See Valid node setup for information on how to ensure that a node meets the requirements to join a Kubernetes cluster.
  • Add nodes to the cluster: If you are managing your own cluster you can add nodes by setting up your own machines and either adding them manually or having them register themselves to the cluster’s apiserver. See the Nodes section for information on how to set up Kubernetes to add nodes in these ways.
  • Add Windows nodes to the cluster: Kubernetes offers support for Windows worker nodes, allowing you to run workloads implemented in Windows containers. See Windows in Kubernetes for details.
  • Scale nodes: Have a plan for expanding the capacity your cluster will eventually need. See Considerations for large clusters to help determine how many nodes you need, based on the number of pods and containers you need to run. If you are managing nodes yourself, this can mean purchasing and installing your own physical equipment.
  • Autoscale nodes: Most cloud providers support Cluster Autoscaler to replace unhealthy nodes or grow and shrink the number of nodes as demand requires. See the Frequently Asked Questions for how the autoscaler works and Deployment for how it is implemented by different cloud providers. For on-premises, there are some virtualization platforms that can be scripted to spin up new nodes based on demand.
  • Set up node health checks: For important workloads, you want to make sure that the nodes and pods running on those nodes are healthy. Using the Node Problem Detector daemon, you can ensure your nodes are healthy.

Production user management

In production, you may be moving from a model where you or a small group of people are accessing the cluster to where there may potentially be dozens or hundreds of people. In a learning environment or platform prototype, you might have a single administrative account for everything you do. In production, you will want more accounts with different levels of access to different namespaces.

Taking on a production-quality cluster means deciding how you want to selectively allow access by other users. In particular, you need to select strategies for validating the identities of those who try to access your cluster (authentication) and deciding if they have permissions to do what they are asking (authorization):

  • Authentication: The apiserver can authenticate users using client certificates, bearer tokens, an authenticating proxy, or HTTP basic auth. You can choose which authentication methods you want to use. Using plugins, the apiserver can leverage your organization’s existing authentication methods, such as LDAP or Kerberos. See Authentication for a description of these different methods of authenticating Kubernetes users.
  • Authorization: When you set out to authorize your regular users, you will probably choose between RBAC and ABAC authorization. See Authorization Overview to review different modes for authorizing user accounts (as well as service account access to your cluster):
    • Role-based access control (RBAC): Lets you assign access to your cluster by allowing specific sets of permissions to authenticated users. Permissions can be assigned for a specific namespace (Role) or across the entire cluster (ClusterRole). Then using RoleBindings and ClusterRoleBindings, those permissions can be attached to particular users.
    • Attribute-based access control (ABAC): Lets you create policies based on resource attributes in the cluster and will allow or deny access based on those attributes. Each line of a policy file identifies versioning properties (apiVersion and kind) and a map of spec properties to match the subject (user or group), resource property, non-resource property (/version or /apis), and readonly. See Examples for details.

As someone setting up authentication and authorization on your production Kubernetes cluster, here are some things to consider:

  • Set the authorization mode: When the Kubernetes API server (kube-apiserver) starts, the supported authentication modes must be set using the --authorization-mode flag. For example, that flag in the kube-adminserver.yaml file (in /etc/kubernetes/manifests) could be set to Node,RBAC. This would allow Node and RBAC authorization for authenticated requests.
  • Create user certificates and role bindings (RBAC): If you are using RBAC authorization, users can create a CertificateSigningRequest (CSR) that can be signed by the cluster CA. Then you can bind Roles and ClusterRoles to each user. See Certificate Signing Requests for details.
  • Create policies that combine attributes (ABAC): If you are using ABAC authorization, you can assign combinations of attributes to form policies to authorize selected users or groups to access particular resources (such as a pod), namespace, or apiGroup. For more information, see Examples.
  • Consider Admission Controllers: Additional forms of authorization for requests that can come in through the API server include Webhook Token Authentication. Webhooks and other special authorization types need to be enabled by adding Admission Controllers to the API server.

Set limits on workload resources

Demands from production workloads can cause pressure both inside and outside of the Kubernetes control plane. Consider these items when setting up for the needs of your cluster's workloads:

  • Set namespace limits: Set per-namespace quotas on things like memory and CPU. See Manage Memory, CPU, and API Resources for details. You can also set Hierarchical Namespaces for inheriting limits.
  • Prepare for DNS demand: If you expect workloads to massively scale up, your DNS service must be ready to scale up as well. See Autoscale the DNS service in a Cluster.
  • Create additional service accounts: User accounts determine what users can do on a cluster, while a service account defines pod access within a particular namespace. By default, a pod takes on the default service account from its namespace. See Managing Service Accounts for information on creating a new service account. For example, you might want to:

What's next

1 - Container Runtimes

You need to install a container runtime into each node in the cluster so that Pods can run there. This page outlines what is involved and describes related tasks for setting up nodes.

Kubernetes 1.24 requires that you use a runtime that conforms with the Container Runtime Interface (CRI).

See CRI version support for more information.

This page provides an outline of how to use several common container runtimes with Kubernetes.

Cgroup drivers

On Linux, control groups are used to constrain resources that are allocated to processes.

When systemd is chosen as the init system for a Linux distribution, the init process generates and consumes a root control group (cgroup) and acts as a cgroup manager. Systemd has a tight integration with cgroups and allocates a cgroup per systemd unit. It's possible to configure your container runtime and the kubelet to use cgroupfs. Using cgroupfs alongside systemd means that there will be two different cgroup managers.

A single cgroup manager simplifies the view of what resources are being allocated and will by default have a more consistent view of the available and in-use resources. When there are two cgroup managers on a system, you end up with two views of those resources. In the field, people have reported cases where nodes that are configured to use cgroupfs for the kubelet and Docker, but systemd for the rest of the processes, become unstable under resource pressure.

Changing the settings such that your container runtime and kubelet use systemd as the cgroup driver stabilized the system. To configure this for Docker, set native.cgroupdriver=systemd.

Cgroup version 2

Cgroup v2 is the next version of the cgroup Linux API. Differently than cgroup v1, there is a single hierarchy instead of a different one for each controller.

The new version offers several improvements over cgroup v1, some of these improvements are:

  • cleaner and easier to use API
  • safe sub-tree delegation to containers
  • newer features like Pressure Stall Information

Even if the kernel supports a hybrid configuration where some controllers are managed by cgroup v1 and some others by cgroup v2, Kubernetes supports only the same cgroup version to manage all the controllers.

If systemd doesn't use cgroup v2 by default, you can configure the system to use it by adding systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=1 to the kernel command line.

# This example is for a Linux OS that uses the DNF package manager
# Your system might use a different method for setting the command line
# that the Linux kernel uses.
sudo dnf install -y grubby && \
  sudo grubby \
  --update-kernel=ALL \
  --args="systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=1"

If you change the command line for the kernel, you must reboot the node before your change takes effect.

There should not be any noticeable difference in the user experience when switching to cgroup v2, unless users are accessing the cgroup file system directly, either on the node or from within the containers.

In order to use it, cgroup v2 must be supported by the CRI runtime as well.

Migrating to the systemd driver in kubeadm managed clusters

If you wish to migrate to the systemd cgroup driver in existing kubeadm managed clusters, follow configuring a cgroup driver.

CRI version support

Your container runtime must support at least v1alpha2 of the container runtime interface.

Kubernetes 1.24 defaults to using v1 of the CRI API. If a container runtime does not support the v1 API, the kubelet falls back to using the (deprecated) v1alpha2 API instead.

Container runtimes

containerd

This section outlines the necessary steps to use containerd as CRI runtime.

Use the following commands to install Containerd on your system:

  1. Install and configure prerequisites:

    (these instructions apply to Linux nodes only)

    cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/modules-load.d/containerd.conf
overlay
br_netfilter
EOF

sudo modprobe overlay
sudo modprobe br_netfilter

# Setup required sysctl params, these persist across reboots.
cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/99-kubernetes-cri.conf
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables  = 1
net.ipv4.ip_forward                 = 1
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 1
EOF

# Apply sysctl params without reboot
sudo sysctl --system

  2. Install containerd:

    Visit Getting started with containerd and follow the instructions there, up to the point where you have a valid configuration file, config.toml. On Linux, you can find this file under the path /etc/containerd/config.toml. On Windows, you can find this file under the path C:\Program Files\containerd\config.toml.

On Linux the default CRI socket for containerd is /run/containerd/containerd.sock. On Windows the default CRI endpoint is npipe://./pipe/containerd-containerd.

Configuring the systemd cgroup driver

To use the systemd cgroup driver in /etc/containerd/config.toml with runc, set

[plugins."io.containerd.grpc.v1.cri".containerd.runtimes.runc]
  ...
  [plugins."io.containerd.grpc.v1.cri".containerd.runtimes.runc.options]
    SystemdCgroup = true

If you apply this change, make sure to restart containerd:

sudo systemctl restart containerd

When using kubeadm, manually configure the cgroup driver for kubelet.

CRI-O

This section contains the necessary steps to install CRI-O as a container runtime.

To install CRI-O, follow CRI-O Install Instructions.

cgroup driver

CRI-O uses the systemd cgroup driver per default, which is likely to work fine for you. To switch to the cgroupfs cgroup driver, either edit /etc/crio/crio.conf or place a drop-in configuration in /etc/crio/crio.conf.d/02-cgroup-manager.conf, for example:

[crio.runtime]
conmon_cgroup = "pod"
cgroup_manager = "cgroupfs"

You should also note the changed conmon_cgroup, which has to be set to the value pod when using CRI-O with cgroupfs. It is generally necessary to keep the cgroup driver configuration of the kubelet (usually done via kubeadm) and CRI-O in sync.

For CRI-O, the CRI socket is /var/run/crio/crio.sock by default.

Docker Engine

  1. On each of your nodes, install Docker for your Linux distribution as per Install Docker Engine.

  2. Install cri-dockerd, following the instructions in that source code repository.

For cri-dockerd, the CRI socket is /run/cri-dockerd.sock by default.

Mirantis Container Runtime

Mirantis Container Runtime (MCR) is a commercially available container runtime that was formerly known as Docker Enterprise Edition.

You can use Mirantis Container Runtime with Kubernetes using the open source cri-dockerd component, included with MCR.

To learn more about how to install Mirantis Container Runtime, visit MCR Deployment Guide.

Check the systemd unit named cri-docker.socket to find out the path to the CRI socket.

What's next

As well as a container runtime, your cluster will need a working network plugin.

2 - Installing Kubernetes with deployment tools

2.1 - Bootstrapping clusters with kubeadm

2.1.1 - Installing kubeadm

This page shows how to install the kubeadm toolbox. For information on how to create a cluster with kubeadm once you have performed this installation process, see the Using kubeadm to Create a Cluster page.

Before you begin

  • A compatible Linux host. The Kubernetes project provides generic instructions for Linux distributions based on Debian and Red Hat, and those distributions without a package manager.
  • 2 GB or more of RAM per machine (any less will leave little room for your apps).
  • 2 CPUs or more.
  • Full network connectivity between all machines in the cluster (public or private network is fine).
  • Unique hostname, MAC address, and product_uuid for every node. See here for more details.
  • Certain ports are open on your machines. See here for more details.
  • Swap disabled. You MUST disable swap in order for the kubelet to work properly.

Verify the MAC address and product_uuid are unique for every node

  • You can get the MAC address of the network interfaces using the command ip link or ifconfig -a
  • The product_uuid can be checked by using the command sudo cat /sys/class/dmi/id/product_uuid

It is very likely that hardware devices will have unique addresses, although some virtual machines may have identical values. Kubernetes uses these values to uniquely identify the nodes in the cluster. If these values are not unique to each node, the installation process may fail.

Check network adapters

If you have more than one network adapter, and your Kubernetes components are not reachable on the default route, we recommend you add IP route(s) so Kubernetes cluster addresses go via the appropriate adapter.

Letting iptables see bridged traffic

Make sure that the br_netfilter module is loaded. This can be done by running lsmod | grep br_netfilter. To load it explicitly call sudo modprobe br_netfilter.

As a requirement for your Linux Node's iptables to correctly see bridged traffic, you should ensure net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables is set to 1 in your sysctl config, e.g.

cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/modules-load.d/k8s.conf
br_netfilter
EOF

cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/k8s.conf
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 1
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables = 1
EOF
sudo sysctl --system

For more details please see the Network Plugin Requirements page.

Check required ports

These required ports need to be open in order for Kubernetes components to communicate with each other. You can use tools like netcat to check if a port is open. For example:

nc 127.0.0.1 6443

The pod network plugin you use may also require certain ports to be open. Since this differs with each pod network plugin, please see the documentation for the plugins about what port(s) those need.

Installing a container runtime

To run containers in Pods, Kubernetes uses a container runtime.

By default, Kubernetes uses the Container Runtime Interface (CRI) to interface with your chosen container runtime.

If you don't specify a runtime, kubeadm automatically tries to detect an installed container runtime by scanning through a list of known endpoints.

If multiple or no container runtimes are detected kubeadm will throw an error and will request that you specify which one you want to use.

See container runtimes for more information.

The tables below include the known endpoints for supported operating systems:

Runtime Path to Unix domain socket
containerd unix:///var/run/containerd/containerd.sock
CRI-O unix:///var/run/crio/crio.sock
Docker Engine (using cri-dockerd) unix:///var/run/cri-dockerd.sock

Runtime Path to Windows named pipe
containerd npipe:////./pipe/containerd-containerd
Docker Engine (using cri-dockerd) npipe:////./pipe/cri-dockerd

Installing kubeadm, kubelet and kubectl

You will install these packages on all of your machines:

  • kubeadm: the command to bootstrap the cluster.

  • kubelet: the component that runs on all of the machines in your cluster and does things like starting pods and containers.

  • kubectl: the command line util to talk to your cluster.

kubeadm will not install or manage kubelet or kubectl for you, so you will need to ensure they match the version of the Kubernetes control plane you want kubeadm to install for you. If you do not, there is a risk of a version skew occurring that can lead to unexpected, buggy behaviour. However, one minor version skew between the kubelet and the control plane is supported, but the kubelet version may never exceed the API server version. For example, the kubelet running 1.7.0 should be fully compatible with a 1.8.0 API server, but not vice versa.

For information about installing kubectl, see Install and set up kubectl.

For more information on version skews, see:

  1. Update the apt package index and install packages needed to use the Kubernetes apt repository:

    sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl

  2. Download the Google Cloud public signing key:

    sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/kubernetes-archive-keyring.gpg https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg

  3. Add the Kubernetes apt repository:

    echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/kubernetes-archive-keyring.gpg] https://apt.kubernetes.io/ kubernetes-xenial main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kubernetes.list

  4. Update apt package index, install kubelet, kubeadm and kubectl, and pin their version:

    sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y kubelet kubeadm kubectl
sudo apt-mark hold kubelet kubeadm kubectl


cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/kubernetes.repo
[kubernetes]
name=Kubernetes
baseurl=https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/repos/kubernetes-el7-\$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
repo_gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/doc/yum-key.gpg https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/doc/rpm-package-key.gpg
exclude=kubelet kubeadm kubectl
EOF

# Set SELinux in permissive mode (effectively disabling it)
sudo setenforce 0
sudo sed -i 's/^SELINUX=enforcing$/SELINUX=permissive/' /etc/selinux/config

sudo yum install -y kubelet kubeadm kubectl --disableexcludes=kubernetes

sudo systemctl enable --now kubelet

Notes:

  • Setting SELinux in permissive mode by running setenforce 0 and sed ... effectively disables it. This is required to allow containers to access the host filesystem, which is needed by pod networks for example. You have to do this until SELinux support is improved in the kubelet.

  • You can leave SELinux enabled if you know how to configure it but it may require settings that are not supported by kubeadm.

  • If the baseurl fails because your Red Hat-based distribution cannot interpret basearch, replace \$basearch with your computer's architecture. Type uname -m to see that value. For example, the baseurl URL for x86_64 could be: https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/repos/kubernetes-el7-x86_64.

Install CNI plugins (required for most pod network):

CNI_VERSION="v0.8.2"
ARCH="amd64"
sudo mkdir -p /opt/cni/bin
curl -L "https://github.com/containernetworking/plugins/releases/download/${CNI_VERSION}/cni-plugins-linux-${ARCH}-${CNI_VERSION}.tgz" | sudo tar -C /opt/cni/bin -xz

Define the directory to download command files

DOWNLOAD_DIR=/usr/local/bin
sudo mkdir -p $DOWNLOAD_DIR

Install crictl (required for kubeadm / Kubelet Container Runtime Interface (CRI))

CRICTL_VERSION="v1.22.0"
ARCH="amd64"
curl -L "https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cri-tools/releases/download/${CRICTL_VERSION}/crictl-${CRICTL_VERSION}-linux-${ARCH}.tar.gz" | sudo tar -C $DOWNLOAD_DIR -xz

Install kubeadm, kubelet, kubectl and add a kubelet systemd service:

RELEASE="$(curl -sSL https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable.txt)"
ARCH="amd64"
cd $DOWNLOAD_DIR
sudo curl -L --remote-name-all https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/${RELEASE}/bin/linux/${ARCH}/{kubeadm,kubelet,kubectl}
sudo chmod +x {kubeadm,kubelet,kubectl}

RELEASE_VERSION="v0.4.0"
curl -sSL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/release/${RELEASE_VERSION}/cmd/kubepkg/templates/latest/deb/kubelet/lib/systemd/system/kubelet.service" | sed "s:/usr/bin:${DOWNLOAD_DIR}:g" | sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/kubelet.service
sudo mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system/kubelet.service.d
curl -sSL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/release/${RELEASE_VERSION}/cmd/kubepkg/templates/latest/deb/kubeadm/10-kubeadm.conf" | sed "s:/usr/bin:${DOWNLOAD_DIR}:g" | sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/kubelet.service.d/10-kubeadm.conf

Enable and start kubelet:

systemctl enable --now kubelet

The kubelet is now restarting every few seconds, as it waits in a crashloop for kubeadm to tell it what to do.

Configuring a cgroup driver

Both the container runtime and the kubelet have a property called "cgroup driver", which is important for the management of cgroups on Linux machines.

Troubleshooting

If you are running into difficulties with kubeadm, please consult our troubleshooting docs.

What's next

2.1.2 - Troubleshooting kubeadm

As with any program, you might run into an error installing or running kubeadm. This page lists some common failure scenarios and have provided steps that can help you understand and fix the problem.

If your problem is not listed below, please follow the following steps:

  • If you think your problem is a bug with kubeadm:

  • If you are unsure about how kubeadm works, you can ask on Slack in #kubeadm, or open a question on StackOverflow. Please include relevant tags like #kubernetes and #kubeadm so folks can help you.

Not possible to join a v1.18 Node to a v1.17 cluster due to missing RBAC

In v1.18 kubeadm added prevention for joining a Node in the cluster if a Node with the same name already exists. This required adding RBAC for the bootstrap-token user to be able to GET a Node object.

However this causes an issue where kubeadm join from v1.18 cannot join a cluster created by kubeadm v1.17.

To workaround the issue you have two options:

Execute kubeadm init phase bootstrap-token on a control-plane node using kubeadm v1.18. Note that this enables the rest of the bootstrap-token permissions as well.

or

Apply the following RBAC manually using kubectl apply -f ...:

apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
  name: kubeadm:get-nodes
rules:
- apiGroups:
  - ""
  resources:
  - nodes
  verbs:
  - get
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
  name: kubeadm:get-nodes
roleRef:
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: kubeadm:get-nodes
subjects:
- apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: Group
  name: system:bootstrappers:kubeadm:default-node-token

ebtables or some similar executable not found during installation

If you see the following warnings while running kubeadm init

[preflight] WARNING: ebtables not found in system path
[preflight] WARNING: ethtool not found in system path

Then you may be missing ebtables, ethtool or a similar executable on your node. You can install them with the following commands:

  • For Ubuntu/Debian users, run apt install ebtables ethtool.
  • For CentOS/Fedora users, run yum install ebtables ethtool.

kubeadm blocks waiting for control plane during installation

If you notice that kubeadm init hangs after printing out the following line:

[apiclient] Created API client, waiting for the control plane to become ready

This may be caused by a number of problems. The most common are:

  • network connection problems. Check that your machine has full network connectivity before continuing.
  • the cgroup driver of the container runtime differs from that of the kubelet. To understand how to configure it properly see Configuring a cgroup driver.
  • control plane containers are crashlooping or hanging. You can check this by running docker ps and investigating each container by running docker logs. For other container runtime see Debugging Kubernetes nodes with crictl.

kubeadm blocks when removing managed containers

The following could happen if the container runtime halts and does not remove any Kubernetes-managed containers:

sudo kubeadm reset

[preflight] Running pre-flight checks
[reset] Stopping the kubelet service
[reset] Unmounting mounted directories in "/var/lib/kubelet"
[reset] Removing kubernetes-managed containers
(block)

A possible solution is to restart the container runtime and then re-run kubeadm reset. You can also use crictl to debug the state of the container runtime. See Debugging Kubernetes nodes with crictl.

Pods in RunContainerError, CrashLoopBackOff or Error state

Right after kubeadm init there should not be any pods in these states.

  • If there are pods in one of these states right after kubeadm init, please open an issue in the kubeadm repo. coredns (or kube-dns) should be in the Pending state until you have deployed the network add-on.
  • If you see Pods in the RunContainerError, CrashLoopBackOff or Error state after deploying the network add-on and nothing happens to coredns (or kube-dns), it's very likely that the Pod Network add-on that you installed is somehow broken. You might have to grant it more RBAC privileges or use a newer version. Please file an issue in the Pod Network providers' issue tracker and get the issue triaged there.

coredns is stuck in the Pending state

This is expected and part of the design. kubeadm is network provider-agnostic, so the admin should install the pod network add-on of choice. You have to install a Pod Network before CoreDNS may be deployed fully. Hence the Pending state before the network is set up.

HostPort services do not work

The HostPort and HostIP functionality is available depending on your Pod Network provider. Please contact the author of the Pod Network add-on to find out whether HostPort and HostIP functionality are available.

Calico, Canal, and Flannel CNI providers are verified to support HostPort.

For more information, see the CNI portmap documentation.

If your network provider does not support the portmap CNI plugin, you may need to use the NodePort feature of services or use HostNetwork=true.

Pods are not accessible via their Service IP

  • Many network add-ons do not yet enable hairpin mode which allows pods to access themselves via their Service IP. This is an issue related to CNI. Please contact the network add-on provider to get the latest status of their support for hairpin mode.

  • If you are using VirtualBox (directly or via Vagrant), you will need to ensure that hostname -i returns a routable IP address. By default the first interface is connected to a non-routable host-only network. A work around is to modify /etc/hosts, see this Vagrantfile for an example.

TLS certificate errors

The following error indicates a possible certificate mismatch.

# kubectl get pods
Unable to connect to the server: x509: certificate signed by unknown authority (possibly because of "crypto/rsa: verification error" while trying to verify candidate authority certificate "kubernetes")

  • Verify that the $HOME/.kube/config file contains a valid certificate, and regenerate a certificate if necessary. The certificates in a kubeconfig file are base64 encoded. The base64 --decode command can be used to decode the certificate and openssl x509 -text -noout can be used for viewing the certificate information.

  • Unset the KUBECONFIG environment variable using:

    unset KUBECONFIG

    Or set it to the default KUBECONFIG location:

    export KUBECONFIG=/etc/kubernetes/admin.conf

  • Another workaround is to overwrite the existing kubeconfig for the "admin" user:

    mv  $HOME/.kube $HOME/.kube.bak
mkdir $HOME/.kube
sudo cp -i /etc/kubernetes/admin.conf $HOME/.kube/config
sudo chown $(id -u):$(id -g) $HOME/.kube/config

Kubelet client certificate rotation fails

By default, kubeadm configures a kubelet with automatic rotation of client certificates by using the /var/lib/kubelet/pki/kubelet-client-current.pem symlink specified in /etc/kubernetes/kubelet.conf. If this rotation process fails you might see errors such as x509: certificate has expired or is not yet valid in kube-apiserver logs. To fix the issue you must follow these steps:

  1. Backup and delete /etc/kubernetes/kubelet.conf and /var/lib/kubelet/pki/kubelet-client* from the failed node.

  2. From a working control plane node in the cluster that has /etc/kubernetes/pki/ca.key execute kubeadm kubeconfig user --org system:nodes --client-name system:node:$NODE > kubelet.conf. $NODE must be set to the name of the existing failed node in the cluster. Modify the resulted kubelet.conf manually to adjust the cluster name and server endpoint, or pass kubeconfig user --config (it accepts InitConfiguration). If your cluster does not have the ca.key you must sign the embedded certificates in the kubelet.conf externally.

  3. Copy this resulted kubelet.conf to /etc/kubernetes/kubelet.conf on the failed node.

  4. Restart the kubelet (systemctl restart kubelet) on the failed node and wait for /var/lib/kubelet/pki/kubelet-client-current.pem to be recreated.

  5. Manually edit the kubelet.conf to point to the rotated kubelet client certificates, by replacing client-certificate-data and client-key-data with:

    client-certificate: /var/lib/kubelet/pki/kubelet-client-current.pem
client-key: /var/lib/kubelet/pki/kubelet-client-current.pem

  6. Restart the kubelet.

  7. Make sure the node becomes Ready.

Default NIC When using flannel as the pod network in Vagrant

The following error might indicate that something was wrong in the pod network:

Error from server (NotFound): the server could not find the requested resource

  • If you're using flannel as the pod network inside Vagrant, then you will have to specify the default interface name for flannel.

    Vagrant typically assigns two interfaces to all VMs. The first, for which all hosts are assigned the IP address 10.0.2.15, is for external traffic that gets NATed.

    This may lead to problems with flannel, which defaults to the first interface on a host. This leads to all hosts thinking they have the same public IP address. To prevent this, pass the --iface eth1 flag to flannel so that the second interface is chosen.

Non-public IP used for containers

In some situations kubectl logs and kubectl run commands may return with the following errors in an otherwise functional cluster:

Error from server: Get https://10.19.0.41:10250/containerLogs/default/mysql-ddc65b868-glc5m/mysql: dial tcp 10.19.0.41:10250: getsockopt: no route to host

  • This may be due to Kubernetes using an IP that can not communicate with other IPs on the seemingly same subnet, possibly by policy of the machine provider.

  • DigitalOcean assigns a public IP to eth0 as well as a private one to be used internally as anchor for their floating IP feature, yet kubelet will pick the latter as the node's InternalIP instead of the public one.

    Use ip addr show to check for this scenario instead of ifconfig because ifconfig will not display the offending alias IP address. Alternatively an API endpoint specific to DigitalOcean allows to query for the anchor IP from the droplet:

    curl http://169.254.169.254/metadata/v1/interfaces/public/0/anchor_ipv4/address

    The workaround is to tell kubelet which IP to use using --node-ip. When using DigitalOcean, it can be the public one (assigned to eth0) or the private one (assigned to eth1) should you want to use the optional private network. The kubeletExtraArgs section of the kubeadm NodeRegistrationOptions structure can be used for this.

    Then restart kubelet:

    systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl restart kubelet

coredns pods have CrashLoopBackOff or Error state

If you have nodes that are running SELinux with an older version of Docker you might experience a scenario where the coredns pods are not starting. To solve that you can try one of the following options:

kubectl -n kube-system get deployment coredns -o yaml | \
  sed 's/allowPrivilegeEscalation: false/allowPrivilegeEscalation: true/g' | \
  kubectl apply -f -

Another cause for CoreDNS to have CrashLoopBackOff is when a CoreDNS Pod deployed in Kubernetes detects a loop. A number of workarounds are available to avoid Kubernetes trying to restart the CoreDNS Pod every time CoreDNS detects the loop and exits.

etcd pods restart continually

If you encounter the following error:

rpc error: code = 2 desc = oci runtime error: exec failed: container_linux.go:247: starting container process caused "process_linux.go:110: decoding init error from pipe caused \"read parent: connection reset by peer\""

this issue appears if you run CentOS 7 with Docker 1.13.1.84. This version of Docker can prevent the kubelet from executing into the etcd container.

To work around the issue, choose one of these options:

  • Roll back to an earlier version of Docker, such as 1.13.1-75
yum downgrade docker-1.13.1-75.git8633870.el7.centos.x86_64 docker-client-1.13.1-75.git8633870.el7.centos.x86_64 docker-common-1.13.1-75.git8633870.el7.centos.x86_64
  • Install one of the more recent recommended versions, such as 18.06:
sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo https://download.docker.com/linux/centos/docker-ce.repo
yum install docker-ce-18.06.1.ce-3.el7.x86_64

Not possible to pass a comma separated list of values to arguments inside a --component-extra-args flag

kubeadm init flags such as --component-extra-args allow you to pass custom arguments to a control-plane component like the kube-apiserver. However, this mechanism is limited due to the underlying type used for parsing the values (mapStringString).

If you decide to pass an argument that supports multiple, comma-separated values such as --apiserver-extra-args "enable-admission-plugins=LimitRanger,NamespaceExists" this flag will fail with flag: malformed pair, expect string=string. This happens because the list of arguments for --apiserver-extra-args expects key=value pairs and in this case NamespacesExists is considered as a key that is missing a value.

Alternatively, you can try separating the key=value pairs like so: --apiserver-extra-args "enable-admission-plugins=LimitRanger,enable-admission-plugins=NamespaceExists" but this will result in the key enable-admission-plugins only having the value of NamespaceExists.

A known workaround is to use the kubeadm configuration file.

kube-proxy scheduled before node is initialized by cloud-controller-manager

In cloud provider scenarios, kube-proxy can end up being scheduled on new worker nodes before the cloud-controller-manager has initialized the node addresses. This causes kube-proxy to fail to pick up the node's IP address properly and has knock-on effects to the proxy function managing load balancers.

The following error can be seen in kube-proxy Pods:

server.go:610] Failed to retrieve node IP: host IP unknown; known addresses: []
proxier.go:340] invalid nodeIP, initializing kube-proxy with 127.0.0.1 as nodeIP

A known solution is to patch the kube-proxy DaemonSet to allow scheduling it on control-plane nodes regardless of their conditions, keeping it off of other nodes until their initial guarding conditions abate:

kubectl -n kube-system patch ds kube-proxy -p='{ "spec": { "template": { "spec": { "tolerations": [ { "key": "CriticalAddonsOnly", "operator": "Exists" }, { "effect": "NoSchedule", "key": "node-role.kubernetes.io/master" }, { "effect": "NoSchedule", "key": "node-role.kubernetes.io/control-plane" } ] } } } }'

The tracking issue for this problem is here.

/usr is mounted read-only on nodes

On Linux distributions such as Fedora CoreOS or Flatcar Container Linux, the directory /usr is mounted as a read-only filesystem. For flex-volume support, Kubernetes components like the kubelet and kube-controller-manager use the default path of /usr/libexec/kubernetes/kubelet-plugins/volume/exec/, yet the flex-volume directory must be writeable for the feature to work. (Note: FlexVolume was deprecated in the Kubernetes v1.23 release)

To workaround this issue you can configure the flex-volume directory using the kubeadm configuration file.

On the primary control-plane Node (created using kubeadm init) pass the following file using --config:

apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta3
kind: InitConfiguration
nodeRegistration:
  kubeletExtraArgs:
    volume-plugin-dir: "/opt/libexec/kubernetes/kubelet-plugins/volume/exec/"
---
apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta3
kind: ClusterConfiguration
controllerManager:
  extraArgs:
    flex-volume-plugin-dir: "/opt/libexec/kubernetes/kubelet-plugins/volume/exec/"

On joining Nodes:

apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta3
kind: JoinConfiguration
nodeRegistration:
  kubeletExtraArgs:
    volume-plugin-dir: "/opt/libexec/kubernetes/kubelet-plugins/volume/exec/"

Alternatively, you can modify /etc/fstab to make the /usr mount writeable, but please be advised that this is modifying a design principle of the Linux distribution.

kubeadm upgrade plan prints out context deadline exceeded error message

This error message is shown when upgrading a Kubernetes cluster with kubeadm in the case of running an external etcd. This is not a critical bug and happens because older versions of kubeadm perform a version check on the external etcd cluster. You can proceed with kubeadm upgrade apply ....

This issue is fixed as of version 1.19.

kubeadm reset unmounts /var/lib/kubelet

If /var/lib/kubelet is being mounted, performing a kubeadm reset will effectively unmount it.

To workaround the issue, re-mount the /var/lib/kubelet directory after performing the kubeadm reset operation.

This is a regression introduced in kubeadm 1.15. The issue is fixed in 1.20.

Cannot use the metrics-server securely in a kubeadm cluster

In a kubeadm cluster, the metrics-server can be used insecurely by passing the --kubelet-insecure-tls to it. This is not recommended for production clusters.

If you want to use TLS between the metrics-server and the kubelet there is a problem, since kubeadm deploys a self-signed serving certificate for the kubelet. This can cause the following errors on the side of the metrics-server:

x509: certificate signed by unknown authority
x509: certificate is valid for IP-foo not IP-bar

See Enabling signed kubelet serving certificates to understand how to configure the kubelets in a kubeadm cluster to have properly signed serving certificates.

Also see How to run the metrics-server securely.

2.1.3 - Creating a cluster with kubeadm

Using kubeadm, you can create a minimum viable Kubernetes cluster that conforms to best practices. In fact, you can use kubeadm to set up a cluster that will pass the Kubernetes Conformance tests. kubeadm also supports other cluster lifecycle functions, such as bootstrap tokens and cluster upgrades.

The kubeadm tool is good if you need:

  • A simple way for you to try out Kubernetes, possibly for the first time.
  • A way for existing users to automate setting up a cluster and test their application.
  • A building block in other ecosystem and/or installer tools with a larger scope.

You can install and use kubeadm on various machines: your laptop, a set of cloud servers, a Raspberry Pi, and more. Whether you're deploying into the cloud or on-premises, you can integrate kubeadm into provisioning systems such as Ansible or Terraform.

Before you begin

To follow this guide, you need:

  • One or more machines running a deb/rpm-compatible Linux OS; for example: Ubuntu or CentOS.
  • 2 GiB or more of RAM per machine--any less leaves little room for your apps.
  • At least 2 CPUs on the machine that you use as a control-plane node.
  • Full network connectivity among all machines in the cluster. You can use either a public or a private network.

You also need to use a version of kubeadm that can deploy the version of Kubernetes that you want to use in your new cluster.

Kubernetes' version and version skew support policy applies to kubeadm as well as to Kubernetes overall. Check that policy to learn about what versions of Kubernetes and kubeadm are supported. This page is written for Kubernetes v1.24.

The kubeadm tool's overall feature state is General Availability (GA). Some sub-features are still under active development. The implementation of creating the cluster may change slightly as the tool evolves, but the overall implementation should be pretty stable.

Objectives

  • Install a single control-plane Kubernetes cluster
  • Install a Pod network on the cluster so that your Pods can talk to each other

Instructions

Preparing the hosts

Install a container runtime and kubeadm on all the hosts. For detailed instructions and other prerequisites, see Installing kubeadm.

Preparing the required container images

This step is optional and only applies in case you wish kubeadm init and kubeadm join to not download the default container images which are hosted at k8s.gcr.io.

Kubeadm has commands that can help you pre-pull the required images when creating a cluster without an internet connection on its nodes. See Running kubeadm without an internet connection for more details.

Kubeadm allows you to use a custom image repository for the required images. See Using custom images for more details.

Initializing your control-plane node

The control-plane node is the machine where the control plane components run, including etcd (the cluster database) and the API Server (which the kubectl command line tool communicates with).

  1. (Recommended) If you have plans to upgrade this single control-plane kubeadm cluster to high availability you should specify the --control-plane-endpoint to set the shared endpoint for all control-plane nodes. Such an endpoint can be either a DNS name or an IP address of a load-balancer.
  2. Choose a Pod network add-on, and verify whether it requires any arguments to be passed to kubeadm init. Depending on which third-party provider you choose, you might need to set the --pod-network-cidr to a provider-specific value. See Installing a Pod network add-on.
  3. (Optional) kubeadm tries to detect the container runtime by using a list of well known endpoints. To use different container runtime or if there are more than one installed on the provisioned node, specify the --cri-socket argument to kubeadm. See Installing a runtime.
  4. (Optional) Unless otherwise specified, kubeadm uses the network interface associated with the default gateway to set the advertise address for this particular control-plane node's API server. To use a different network interface, specify the --apiserver-advertise-address=<ip-address> argument to kubeadm init. To deploy an IPv6 Kubernetes cluster using IPv6 addressing, you must specify an IPv6 address, for example --apiserver-advertise-address=fd00::101

To initialize the control-plane node run:

kubeadm init <args>

Considerations about apiserver-advertise-address and ControlPlaneEndpoint

While --apiserver-advertise-address can be used to set the advertise address for this particular control-plane node's API server, --control-plane-endpoint can be used to set the shared endpoint for all control-plane nodes.

--control-plane-endpoint allows both IP addresses and DNS names that can map to IP addresses. Please contact your network administrator to evaluate possible solutions with respect to such mapping.

Here is an example mapping:

192.168.0.102 cluster-endpoint

Where 192.168.0.102 is the IP address of this node and cluster-endpoint is a custom DNS name that maps to this IP. This will allow you to pass --control-plane-endpoint=cluster-endpoint to kubeadm init and pass the same DNS name to kubeadm join. Later you can modify cluster-endpoint to point to the address of your load-balancer in an high availability scenario.

Turning a single control plane cluster created without --control-plane-endpoint into a highly available cluster is not supported by kubeadm.

More information

For more information about kubeadm init arguments, see the kubeadm reference guide.

To configure kubeadm init with a configuration file see Using kubeadm init with a configuration file.

To customize control plane components, including optional IPv6 assignment to liveness probe for control plane components and etcd server, provide extra arguments to each component as documented in custom arguments.

To reconfigure a cluster that has already been created see Reconfiguring a kubeadm cluster.

To run kubeadm init again, you must first tear down the cluster.

If you join a node with a different architecture to your cluster, make sure that your deployed DaemonSets have container image support for this architecture.

kubeadm init first runs a series of prechecks to ensure that the machine is ready to run Kubernetes. These prechecks expose warnings and exit on errors. kubeadm init then downloads and installs the cluster control plane components. This may take several minutes. After it finishes you should see:

Your Kubernetes control-plane has initialized successfully!

To start using your cluster, you need to run the following as a regular user:

  mkdir -p $HOME/.kube
  sudo cp -i /etc/kubernetes/admin.conf $HOME/.kube/config
  sudo chown $(id -u):$(id -g) $HOME/.kube/config

You should now deploy a Pod network to the cluster.
Run "kubectl apply -f [podnetwork].yaml" with one of the options listed at:
  /docs/concepts/cluster-administration/addons/

You can now join any number of machines by running the following on each node
as root:

  kubeadm join <control-plane-host>:<control-plane-port> --token <token> --discovery-token-ca-cert-hash sha256:<hash>

To make kubectl work for your non-root user, run these commands, which are also part of the kubeadm init output:

mkdir -p $HOME/.kube
sudo cp -i /etc/kubernetes/admin.conf $HOME/.kube/config
sudo chown $(id -u):$(id -g) $HOME/.kube/config

Alternatively, if you are the root user, you can run:

export KUBECONFIG=/etc/kubernetes/admin.conf

Make a record of the kubeadm join command that kubeadm init outputs. You need this command to join nodes to your cluster.

The token is used for mutual authentication between the control-plane node and the joining nodes. The token included here is secret. Keep it safe, because anyone with this token can add authenticated nodes to your cluster. These tokens can be listed, created, and deleted with the kubeadm token command. See the kubeadm reference guide.

Installing a Pod network add-on

Several external projects provide Kubernetes Pod networks using CNI, some of which also support Network Policy.

See a list of add-ons that implement the Kubernetes networking model.

You can install a Pod network add-on with the following command on the control-plane node or a node that has the kubeconfig credentials:

kubectl apply -f <add-on.yaml>

You can install only one Pod network per cluster.

Once a Pod network has been installed, you can confirm that it is working by checking that the CoreDNS Pod is Running in the output of kubectl get pods --all-namespaces. And once the CoreDNS Pod is up and running, you can continue by joining your nodes.

If your network is not working or CoreDNS is not in the Running state, check out the troubleshooting guide for kubeadm.

Managed node labels

By default, kubeadm enables the NodeRestriction admission controller that restricts what labels can be self-applied by kubelets on node registration. The admission controller documentation covers what labels are permitted to be used with the kubelet --node-labels option. The node-role.kubernetes.io/control-plane label is such a restricted label and kubeadm manually applies it using a privileged client after a node has been created. To do that manually you can do the same by using kubectl label and ensure it is using a privileged kubeconfig such as the kubeadm managed /etc/kubernetes/admin.conf.

Control plane node isolation

By default, your cluster will not schedule Pods on the control plane nodes for security reasons. If you want to be able to schedule Pods on the control plane nodes, for example for a single machine Kubernetes cluster, run:

kubectl taint nodes --all node-role.kubernetes.io/control-plane- node-role.kubernetes.io/master-

The output will look something like:

node "test-01" untainted
...

This will remove the node-role.kubernetes.io/control-plane and node-role.kubernetes.io/master taints from any nodes that have them, including the control plane nodes, meaning that the scheduler will then be able to schedule Pods everywhere.

Joining your nodes

The nodes are where your workloads (containers and Pods, etc) run. To add new nodes to your cluster do the following for each machine:

  • SSH to the machine

  • Become root (e.g. sudo su -)

  • Install a runtime if needed

  • Run the command that was output by kubeadm init. For example:

    kubeadm join --token <token> <control-plane-host>:<control-plane-port> --discovery-token-ca-cert-hash sha256:<hash>

If you do not have the token, you can get it by running the following command on the control-plane node:

kubeadm token list

The output is similar to this:

TOKEN                    TTL  EXPIRES              USAGES           DESCRIPTION            EXTRA GROUPS
8ewj1p.9r9hcjoqgajrj4gi  23h  2018-06-12T02:51:28Z authentication,  The default bootstrap  system:
                                                   signing          token generated by     bootstrappers:
                                                                    'kubeadm init'.        kubeadm:
                                                                                           default-node-token

By default, tokens expire after 24 hours. If you are joining a node to the cluster after the current token has expired, you can create a new token by running the following command on the control-plane node:

kubeadm token create

The output is similar to this:

5didvk.d09sbcov8ph2amjw

If you don't have the value of --discovery-token-ca-cert-hash, you can get it by running the following command chain on the control-plane node:

openssl x509 -pubkey -in /etc/kubernetes/pki/ca.crt | openssl rsa -pubin -outform der 2>/dev/null | \
   openssl dgst -sha256 -hex | sed 's/^.* //'

The output is similar to:

8cb2de97839780a412b93877f8507ad6c94f73add17d5d7058e91741c9d5ec78

The output should look something like:

[preflight] Running pre-flight checks

... (log output of join workflow) ...

Node join complete:
* Certificate signing request sent to control-plane and response
  received.
* Kubelet informed of new secure connection details.

Run 'kubectl get nodes' on control-plane to see this machine join.

A few seconds later, you should notice this node in the output from kubectl get nodes when run on the control-plane node.

(Optional) Controlling your cluster from machines other than the control-plane node

In order to get a kubectl on some other computer (e.g. laptop) to talk to your cluster, you need to copy the administrator kubeconfig file from your control-plane node to your workstation like this:

scp root@<control-plane-host>:/etc/kubernetes/admin.conf .
kubectl --kubeconfig ./admin.conf get nodes

(Optional) Proxying API Server to localhost

If you want to connect to the API Server from outside the cluster you can use kubectl proxy:

scp root@<control-plane-host>:/etc/kubernetes/admin.conf .
kubectl --kubeconfig ./admin.conf proxy

You can now access the API Server locally at http://localhost:8001/api/v1

Clean up

If you used disposable servers for your cluster, for testing, you can switch those off and do no further clean up. You can use kubectl config delete-cluster to delete your local references to the cluster.

However, if you want to deprovision your cluster more cleanly, you should first drain the node and make sure that the node is empty, then deconfigure the node.

Remove the node

Talking to the control-plane node with the appropriate credentials, run:

kubectl drain <node name> --delete-emptydir-data --force --ignore-daemonsets

Before removing the node, reset the state installed by kubeadm:

kubeadm reset

The reset process does not reset or clean up iptables rules or IPVS tables. If you wish to reset iptables, you must do so manually:

iptables -F && iptables -t nat -F && iptables -t mangle -F && iptables -X

If you want to reset the IPVS tables, you must run the following command:

ipvsadm -C

Now remove the node:

kubectl delete node <node name>

If you wish to start over, run kubeadm init or kubeadm join with the appropriate arguments.

Clean up the control plane

You can use kubeadm reset on the control plane host to trigger a best-effort clean up.

See the kubeadm reset reference documentation for more information about this subcommand and its options.

What's next

Feedback

Version skew policy

While kubeadm allows version skew against some components that it manages, it is recommended that you match the kubeadm version with the versions of the control plane components, kube-proxy and kubelet.

kubeadm's skew against the Kubernetes version

kubeadm can be used with Kubernetes components that are the same version as kubeadm or one version older. The Kubernetes version can be specified to kubeadm by using the --kubernetes-version flag of kubeadm init or the ClusterConfiguration.kubernetesVersion field when using --config. This option will control the versions of kube-apiserver, kube-controller-manager, kube-scheduler and kube-proxy.

Example:

  • kubeadm is at 1.24
  • kubernetesVersion must be at 1.24 or 1.23

kubeadm's skew against the kubelet

Similarly to the Kubernetes version, kubeadm can be used with a kubelet version that is the same version as kubeadm or one version older.

Example:

  • kubeadm is at 1.24
  • kubelet on the host must be at 1.24 or 1.23

kubeadm's skew against kubeadm

There are certain limitations on how kubeadm commands can operate on existing nodes or whole clusters managed by kubeadm.

If new nodes are joined to the cluster, the kubeadm binary used for kubeadm join must match the last version of kubeadm used to either create the cluster with kubeadm init or to upgrade the same node with kubeadm upgrade. Similar rules apply to the rest of the kubeadm commands with the exception of kubeadm upgrade.

Example for kubeadm join:

  • kubeadm version 1.24 was used to create a cluster with kubeadm init
  • Joining nodes must use a kubeadm binary that is at version 1.24

Nodes that are being upgraded must use a version of kubeadm that is the same MINOR version or one MINOR version newer than the version of kubeadm used for managing the node.

Example for kubeadm upgrade:

  • kubeadm version 1.23 was used to create or upgrade the node
  • The version of kubeadm used for upgrading the node must be at 1.23 or 1.24

To learn more about the version skew between the different Kubernetes component see the Version Skew Policy.

Limitations

Cluster resilience

The cluster created here has a single control-plane node, with a single etcd database running on it. This means that if the control-plane node fails, your cluster may lose data and may need to be recreated from scratch.

Workarounds:

Platform compatibility

kubeadm deb/rpm packages and binaries are built for amd64, arm (32-bit), arm64, ppc64le, and s390x following the multi-platform proposal.

Multiplatform container images for the control plane and addons are also supported since v1.12.

Only some of the network providers offer solutions for all platforms. Please consult the list of network providers above or the documentation from each provider to figure out whether the provider supports your chosen platform.

Troubleshooting

If you are running into difficulties with kubeadm, please consult our troubleshooting docs.

2.1.4 - Customizing components with the kubeadm API

This page covers how to customize the components that kubeadm deploys. For control plane components you can use flags in the ClusterConfiguration structure or patches per-node. For the kubelet and kube-proxy you can use KubeletConfiguration and KubeProxyConfiguration, accordingly.

All of these options are possible via the kubeadm configuration API. For more details on each field in the configuration you can navigate to our API reference pages.

Customizing the control plane with flags in ClusterConfiguration

The kubeadm ClusterConfiguration object exposes a way for users to override the default flags passed to control plane components such as the APIServer, ControllerManager, Scheduler and Etcd. The components are defined using the following structures:

  • apiServer
  • controllerManager
  • scheduler
  • etcd

These structures contain a common extraArgs field, that consists of key: value pairs. To override a flag for a control plane component:

  1. Add the appropriate extraArgs to your configuration.
  2. Add flags to the extraArgs field.
  3. Run kubeadm init with --config <YOUR CONFIG YAML>.

APIServer flags

For details, see the reference documentation for kube-apiserver.

Example usage:

apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta3
kind: ClusterConfiguration
kubernetesVersion: v1.16.0
apiServer:
  extraArgs:
    anonymous-auth: "false"
    enable-admission-plugins: AlwaysPullImages,DefaultStorageClass
    audit-log-path: /home/johndoe/audit.log

ControllerManager flags

For details, see the reference documentation for kube-controller-manager.

Example usage:

apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta3
kind: ClusterConfiguration
kubernetesVersion: v1.16.0
controllerManager:
  extraArgs:
    cluster-signing-key-file: /home/johndoe/keys/ca.key
    deployment-controller-sync-period: "50"

Scheduler flags

For details, see the reference documentation for kube-scheduler.

Example usage:

apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta3
kind: ClusterConfiguration
kubernetesVersion: v1.16.0
scheduler:
  extraArgs:
    config: /etc/kubernetes/scheduler-config.yaml
  extraVolumes:
    - name: schedulerconfig
      hostPath: /home/johndoe/schedconfig.yaml
      mountPath: /etc/kubernetes/scheduler-config.yaml
      readOnly: true
      pathType: "File"

Etcd flags

For details, see the etcd server documentation.

Example usage:

apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta3
kind: ClusterConfiguration
etcd:
  local:
    extraArgs:
      election-timeout: 1000

Customizing the control plane with patches

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.22 [beta]

Kubeadm allows you to pass a directory with patch files to InitConfiguration and JoinConfiguration on individual nodes. These patches can be used as the last customization step before the control plane component manifests are written to disk.

You can pass this file to kubeadm init with --config <YOUR CONFIG YAML>:

apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta3
kind: InitConfiguration
patches:
  directory: /home/user/somedir

You can pass this file to kubeadm join with --config <YOUR CONFIG YAML>:

apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta3
kind: JoinConfiguration
patches:
  directory: /home/user/somedir

The directory must contain files named target[suffix][+patchtype].extension. For example, kube-apiserver0+merge.yaml or just etcd.json.

  • target can be one of kube-apiserver, kube-controller-manager, kube-scheduler and etcd.
  • patchtype can be one of strategic, merge or json and these must match the patching formats supported by kubectl. The default patchtype is strategic.
  • extension must be either json or yaml.
  • suffix is an optional string that can be used to determine which patches are applied first alpha-numerically.

Customizing the kubelet

To customize the kubelet you can add a KubeletConfiguration next to the ClusterConfiguration or InitConfiguration separated by --- within the same configuration file. This file can then be passed to kubeadm init.

For more details see Configuring each kubelet in your cluster using kubeadm

Customizing kube-proxy

To customize kube-proxy you can pass a KubeProxyConfiguration next your ClusterConfiguration or InitConfiguration to kubeadm init separated by ---.

For more details you can navigate to our API reference pages.

2.1.5 - Options for Highly Available Topology

This page explains the two options for configuring the topology of your highly available (HA) Kubernetes clusters.

You can set up an HA cluster:

  • With stacked control plane nodes, where etcd nodes are colocated with control plane nodes
  • With external etcd nodes, where etcd runs on separate nodes from the control plane

You should carefully consider the advantages and disadvantages of each topology before setting up an HA cluster.

Stacked etcd topology

A stacked HA cluster is a topology where the distributed data storage cluster provided by etcd is stacked on top of the cluster formed by the nodes managed by kubeadm that run control plane components.

Each control plane node runs an instance of the kube-apiserver, kube-scheduler, and kube-controller-manager. The kube-apiserver is exposed to worker nodes using a load balancer.

Each control plane node creates a local etcd member and this etcd member communicates only with the kube-apiserver of this node. The same applies to the local kube-controller-manager and kube-scheduler instances.

This topology couples the control planes and etcd members on the same nodes. It is simpler to set up than a cluster with external etcd nodes, and simpler to manage for replication.

However, a stacked cluster runs the risk of failed coupling. If one node goes down, both an etcd member and a control plane instance are lost, and redundancy is compromised. You can mitigate this risk by adding more control plane nodes.

You should therefore run a minimum of three stacked control plane nodes for an HA cluster.

This is the default topology in kubeadm. A local etcd member is created automatically on control plane nodes when using kubeadm init and kubeadm join --control-plane.

Stacked etcd topology

External etcd topology

An HA cluster with external etcd is a topology where the distributed data storage cluster provided by etcd is external to the cluster formed by the nodes that run control plane components.

Like the stacked etcd topology, each control plane node in an external etcd topology runs an instance of the kube-apiserver, kube-scheduler, and kube-controller-manager. And the kube-apiserver is exposed to worker nodes using a load balancer. However, etcd members run on separate hosts, and each etcd host communicates with the kube-apiserver of each control plane node.

This topology decouples the control plane and etcd member. It therefore provides an HA setup where losing a control plane instance or an etcd member has less impact and does not affect the cluster redundancy as much as the stacked HA topology.

However, this topology requires twice the number of hosts as the stacked HA topology. A minimum of three hosts for control plane nodes and three hosts for etcd nodes are required for an HA cluster with this topology.

External etcd topology

What's next

2.1.6 - Creating Highly Available Clusters with kubeadm

This page explains two different approaches to setting up a highly available Kubernetes cluster using kubeadm:

  • With stacked control plane nodes. This approach requires less infrastructure. The etcd members and control plane nodes are co-located.
  • With an external etcd cluster. This approach requires more infrastructure. The control plane nodes and etcd members are separated.

Before proceeding, you should carefully consider which approach best meets the needs of your applications and environment. Options for Highly Available topology outlines the advantages and disadvantages of each.

If you encounter issues with setting up the HA cluster, please report these in the kubeadm issue tracker.

See also the upgrade documentation.

Before you begin

The prerequisites depend on which topology you have selected for your cluster's control plane:

You need:

  • Three or more machines that meet kubeadm's minimum requirements for the control-plane nodes. Having an odd number of control plane nodes can help with leader selection in the case of machine or zone failure.
  • Three or more machines that meet kubeadm's minimum requirements for the workers
    • including a container runtime, already set up and working
  • Full network connectivity between all machines in the cluster (public or private network)
  • Superuser privileges on all machines using sudo
    • You can use a different tool; this guide uses sudo in the examples.
  • SSH access from one device to all nodes in the system
  • kubeadm and kubelet already installed on all machines.

See Stacked etcd topology for context.

You need:

  • Three or more machines that meet kubeadm's minimum requirements for the control-plane nodes. Having an odd number of control plane nodes can help with leader selection in the case of machine or zone failure.
  • Three or more machines that meet kubeadm's minimum requirements for the workers
    • including a container runtime, already set up and working
  • Full network connectivity between all machines in the cluster (public or private network)
  • Superuser privileges on all machines using sudo
    • You can use a different tool; this guide uses sudo in the examples.
  • SSH access from one device to all nodes in the system
  • kubeadm and kubelet already installed on all machines.

And you also need:

  • Three or more additional machines, that will become etcd cluster members. Having an odd number of members in the etcd cluster is a requirement for achieving optimal voting quorum.
    • These machines again need to have kubeadm and kubelet installed.
    • These machines also require a container runtime, that is already set up and working.

See External etcd topology for context.

Container images

Each host should have access read and fetch images from the Kubernetes container image registry, k8s.gcr.io. If you want to deploy a highly-available cluster where the hosts do not have access to pull images, this is possible. You must ensure by some other means that the correct container images are already available on the relevant hosts.

Command line interface

To manage Kubernetes once your cluster is set up, you should install kubectl on your PC. It is also useful to install the kubectl tool on each control plane node, as this can be helpful for troubleshooting.

First steps for both methods

Create load balancer for kube-apiserver

  1. Create a kube-apiserver load balancer with a name that resolves to DNS.

    • In a cloud environment you should place your control plane nodes behind a TCP forwarding load balancer. This load balancer distributes traffic to all healthy control plane nodes in its target list. The health check for an apiserver is a TCP check on the port the kube-apiserver listens on (default value :6443).

    • It is not recommended to use an IP address directly in a cloud environment.

    • The load balancer must be able to communicate with all control plane nodes on the apiserver port. It must also allow incoming traffic on its listening port.

    • Make sure the address of the load balancer always matches the address of kubeadm's ControlPlaneEndpoint.

    • Read the Options for Software Load Balancing guide for more details.

  2. Add the first control plane node to the load balancer, and test the connection:

    nc -v <LOAD_BALANCER_IP> <PORT>

    A connection refused error is expected because the API server is not yet running. A timeout, however, means the load balancer cannot communicate with the control plane node. If a timeout occurs, reconfigure the load balancer to communicate with the control plane node.

  3. Add the remaining control plane nodes to the load balancer target group.

Stacked control plane and etcd nodes

Steps for the first control plane node

  1. Initialize the control plane:

    sudo kubeadm init --control-plane-endpoint "LOAD_BALANCER_DNS:LOAD_BALANCER_PORT" --upload-certs

    • You can use the --kubernetes-version flag to set the Kubernetes version to use. It is recommended that the versions of kubeadm, kubelet, kubectl and Kubernetes match.

    • The --control-plane-endpoint flag should be set to the address or DNS and port of the load balancer.

    • The --upload-certs flag is used to upload the certificates that should be shared across all the control-plane instances to the cluster. If instead, you prefer to copy certs across control-plane nodes manually or using automation tools, please remove this flag and refer to Manual certificate distribution section below.

    The output looks similar to:

    ...
You can now join any number of control-plane node by running the following command on each as a root:
    kubeadm join 192.168.0.200:6443 --token 9vr73a.a8uxyaju799qwdjv --discovery-token-ca-cert-hash sha256:7c2e69131a36ae2a042a339b33381c6d0d43887e2de83720eff5359e26aec866 --control-plane --certificate-key f8902e114ef118304e561c3ecd4d0b543adc226b7a07f675f56564185ffe0c07

Please note that the certificate-key gives access to cluster sensitive data, keep it secret!
As a safeguard, uploaded-certs will be deleted in two hours; If necessary, you can use kubeadm init phase upload-certs to reload certs afterward.

Then you can join any number of worker nodes by running the following on each as root:
    kubeadm join 192.168.0.200:6443 --token 9vr73a.a8uxyaju799qwdjv --discovery-token-ca-cert-hash sha256:7c2e69131a36ae2a042a339b33381c6d0d43887e2de83720eff5359e26aec866

    • Copy this output to a text file. You will need it later to join control plane and worker nodes to the cluster.

    • When --upload-certs is used with kubeadm init, the certificates of the primary control plane are encrypted and uploaded in the kubeadm-certs Secret.

    • To re-upload the certificates and generate a new decryption key, use the following command on a control plane node that is already joined to the cluster:

      sudo kubeadm init phase upload-certs --upload-certs

    • You can also specify a custom --certificate-key during init that can later be used by join. To generate such a key you can use the following command:

      kubeadm certs certificate-key

  2. Apply the CNI plugin of your choice:
    Follow these instructions to install the CNI provider. Make sure the configuration corresponds to the Pod CIDR specified in the kubeadm configuration file (if applicable).

  3. Type the following and watch the pods of the control plane components get started:

    kubectl get pod -n kube-system -w

Steps for the rest of the control plane nodes

For each additional control plane node you should:

  1. Execute the join command that was previously given to you by the kubeadm init output on the first node. It should look something like this:

    sudo kubeadm join 192.168.0.200:6443 --token 9vr73a.a8uxyaju799qwdjv --discovery-token-ca-cert-hash sha256:7c2e69131a36ae2a042a339b33381c6d0d43887e2de83720eff5359e26aec866 --control-plane --certificate-key f8902e114ef118304e561c3ecd4d0b543adc226b7a07f675f56564185ffe0c07
    • The --control-plane flag tells kubeadm join to create a new control plane.
    • The --certificate-key ... will cause the control plane certificates to be downloaded from the kubeadm-certs Secret in the cluster and be decrypted using the given key.

You can join multiple control-plane nodes in parallel.

External etcd nodes

Setting up a cluster with external etcd nodes is similar to the procedure used for stacked etcd with the exception that you should setup etcd first, and you should pass the etcd information in the kubeadm config file.

Set up the etcd cluster

  1. Follow these instructions to set up the etcd cluster.

  2. Setup SSH as described here.

  3. Copy the following files from any etcd node in the cluster to the first control plane node:

    export CONTROL_PLANE="ubuntu@10.0.0.7"
scp /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.crt "${CONTROL_PLANE}":
scp /etc/kubernetes/pki/apiserver-etcd-client.crt "${CONTROL_PLANE}":
scp /etc/kubernetes/pki/apiserver-etcd-client.key "${CONTROL_PLANE}":
    • Replace the value of CONTROL_PLANE with the user@host of the first control-plane node.

Set up the first control plane node

  1. Create a file called kubeadm-config.yaml with the following contents:

    ---
apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta3
kind: ClusterConfiguration
kubernetesVersion: stable
controlPlaneEndpoint: "LOAD_BALANCER_DNS:LOAD_BALANCER_PORT" # change this (see below)
etcd:
  external:
    endpoints:
      - https://ETCD_0_IP:2379 # change ETCD_0_IP appropriately
      - https://ETCD_1_IP:2379 # change ETCD_1_IP appropriately
      - https://ETCD_2_IP:2379 # change ETCD_2_IP appropriately
    caFile: /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.crt
    certFile: /etc/kubernetes/pki/apiserver-etcd-client.crt
    keyFile: /etc/kubernetes/pki/apiserver-etcd-client.key

    • Replace the following variables in the config template with the appropriate values for your cluster:

      • LOAD_BALANCER_DNS
      • LOAD_BALANCER_PORT
      • ETCD_0_IP
      • ETCD_1_IP
      • ETCD_2_IP

The following steps are similar to the stacked etcd setup:

  1. Run sudo kubeadm init --config kubeadm-config.yaml --upload-certs on this node.

  2. Write the output join commands that are returned to a text file for later use.

  3. Apply the CNI plugin of your choice.

Steps for the rest of the control plane nodes

The steps are the same as for the stacked etcd setup:

  • Make sure the first control plane node is fully initialized.
  • Join each control plane node with the join command you saved to a text file. It's recommended to join the control plane nodes one at a time.
  • Don't forget that the decryption key from --certificate-key expires after two hours, by default.

Common tasks after bootstrapping control plane

Install workers

Worker nodes can be joined to the cluster with the command you stored previously as the output from the kubeadm init command:

sudo kubeadm join 192.168.0.200:6443 --token 9vr73a.a8uxyaju799qwdjv --discovery-token-ca-cert-hash sha256:7c2e69131a36ae2a042a339b33381c6d0d43887e2de83720eff5359e26aec866

Manual certificate distribution

If you choose to not use kubeadm init with the --upload-certs flag this means that you are going to have to manually copy the certificates from the primary control plane node to the joining control plane nodes.

There are many ways to do this. The following example uses ssh and scp:

SSH is required if you want to control all nodes from a single machine.

  1. Enable ssh-agent on your main device that has access to all other nodes in the system:

    eval $(ssh-agent)

  2. Add your SSH identity to the session:

    ssh-add ~/.ssh/path_to_private_key

  3. SSH between nodes to check that the connection is working correctly.

    • When you SSH to any node, add the -A flag. This flag allows the node that you have logged into via SSH to access the SSH agent on your PC. Consider alternative methods if you do not fully trust the security of your user session on the node.

      ssh -A 10.0.0.7

    • When using sudo on any node, make sure to preserve the environment so SSH forwarding works:

      sudo -E -s

  4. After configuring SSH on all the nodes you should run the following script on the first control plane node after running kubeadm init. This script will copy the certificates from the first control plane node to the other control plane nodes:

    In the following example, replace CONTROL_PLANE_IPS with the IP addresses of the other control plane nodes.

    USER=ubuntu # customizable
CONTROL_PLANE_IPS="10.0.0.7 10.0.0.8"
for host in ${CONTROL_PLANE_IPS}; do
    scp /etc/kubernetes/pki/ca.crt "${USER}"@$host:
    scp /etc/kubernetes/pki/ca.key "${USER}"@$host:
    scp /etc/kubernetes/pki/sa.key "${USER}"@$host:
    scp /etc/kubernetes/pki/sa.pub "${USER}"@$host:
    scp /etc/kubernetes/pki/front-proxy-ca.crt "${USER}"@$host:
    scp /etc/kubernetes/pki/front-proxy-ca.key "${USER}"@$host:
    scp /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.crt "${USER}"@$host:etcd-ca.crt
    # Skip the next line if you are using external etcd
    scp /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.key "${USER}"@$host:etcd-ca.key
done

  5. Then on each joining control plane node you have to run the following script before running kubeadm join. This script will move the previously copied certificates from the home directory to /etc/kubernetes/pki:

    USER=ubuntu # customizable
mkdir -p /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd
mv /home/${USER}/ca.crt /etc/kubernetes/pki/
mv /home/${USER}/ca.key /etc/kubernetes/pki/
mv /home/${USER}/sa.pub /etc/kubernetes/pki/
mv /home/${USER}/sa.key /etc/kubernetes/pki/
mv /home/${USER}/front-proxy-ca.crt /etc/kubernetes/pki/
mv /home/${USER}/front-proxy-ca.key /etc/kubernetes/pki/
mv /home/${USER}/etcd-ca.crt /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.crt
# Skip the next line if you are using external etcd
mv /home/${USER}/etcd-ca.key /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.key

2.1.7 - Set up a High Availability etcd Cluster with kubeadm

By default, kubeadm runs a local etcd instance on each control plane node. It is also possible to treat the etcd cluster as external and provision etcd instances on separate hosts. The differences between the two approaches are covered in the Options for Highly Available topology page.

This task walks through the process of creating a high availability external etcd cluster of three members that can be used by kubeadm during cluster creation.

Before you begin

  • Three hosts that can talk to each other over TCP ports 2379 and 2380. This document assumes these default ports. However, they are configurable through the kubeadm config file.
  • Each host must have systemd and a bash compatible shell installed.
  • Each host must have a container runtime, kubelet, and kubeadm installed.
  • Each host should have access to the Kubernetes container image registry (k8s.gcr.io) or list/pull the required etcd image using kubeadm config images list/pull. This guide will setup etcd instances as static pods managed by a kubelet.
  • Some infrastructure to copy files between hosts. For example ssh and scp can satisfy this requirement.

Setting up the cluster

The general approach is to generate all certs on one node and only distribute the necessary files to the other nodes.

  1. Configure the kubelet to be a service manager for etcd.

    Since etcd was created first, you must override the service priority by creating a new unit file that has higher precedence than the kubeadm-provided kubelet unit file.

    cat << EOF > /etc/systemd/system/kubelet.service.d/20-etcd-service-manager.conf
[Service]
ExecStart=
# Replace "systemd" with the cgroup driver of your container runtime. The default value in the kubelet is "cgroupfs".
# Replace the value of "--container-runtime-endpoint" for a different container runtime if needed.
ExecStart=/usr/bin/kubelet --address=127.0.0.1 --pod-manifest-path=/etc/kubernetes/manifests --cgroup-driver=systemd --container-runtime=remote --container-runtime-endpoint=unix:///var/run/containerd/containerd.sock
Restart=always
EOF

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl restart kubelet

    Check the kubelet status to ensure it is running.

    systemctl status kubelet

  2. Create configuration files for kubeadm.

    Generate one kubeadm configuration file for each host that will have an etcd member running on it using the following script.

    # Update HOST0, HOST1 and HOST2 with the IPs of your hosts
export HOST0=10.0.0.6
export HOST1=10.0.0.7
export HOST2=10.0.0.8

# Update NAME0, NAME1 and NAME2 with the hostnames of your hosts
export NAME0="infra0"
export NAME1="infra1"
export NAME2="infra2"

# Create temp directories to store files that will end up on other hosts.
mkdir -p /tmp/${HOST0}/ /tmp/${HOST1}/ /tmp/${HOST2}/

HOSTS=(${HOST0} ${HOST1} ${HOST2})
NAMES=(${NAME0} ${NAME1} ${NAME2})

for i in "${!HOSTS[@]}"; do
HOST=${HOSTS[$i]}
NAME=${NAMES[$i]}
cat << EOF > /tmp/${HOST}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
---
apiVersion: "kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta3"
kind: InitConfiguration
nodeRegistration:
    name: ${NAME}
localAPIEndpoint:
    advertiseAddress: ${HOST}
---
apiVersion: "kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta3"
kind: ClusterConfiguration
etcd:
    local:
        serverCertSANs:
        - "${HOST}"
        peerCertSANs:
        - "${HOST}"
        extraArgs:
            initial-cluster: ${NAMES[0]}=https://${HOSTS[0]}:2380,${NAMES[1]}=https://${HOSTS[1]}:2380,${NAMES[2]}=https://${HOSTS[2]}:2380
            initial-cluster-state: new
            name: ${NAME}
            listen-peer-urls: https://${HOST}:2380
            listen-client-urls: https://${HOST}:2379
            advertise-client-urls: https://${HOST}:2379
            initial-advertise-peer-urls: https://${HOST}:2380
EOF
done

  3. Generate the certificate authority

    If you already have a CA then the only action that is copying the CA's crt and key file to /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.crt and /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.key. After those files have been copied, proceed to the next step, "Create certificates for each member".

    If you do not already have a CA then run this command on $HOST0 (where you generated the configuration files for kubeadm).

    kubeadm init phase certs etcd-ca

    This creates two files

    • /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.crt
    • /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.key

  4. Create certificates for each member

    kubeadm init phase certs etcd-server --config=/tmp/${HOST2}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
kubeadm init phase certs etcd-peer --config=/tmp/${HOST2}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
kubeadm init phase certs etcd-healthcheck-client --config=/tmp/${HOST2}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
kubeadm init phase certs apiserver-etcd-client --config=/tmp/${HOST2}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
cp -R /etc/kubernetes/pki /tmp/${HOST2}/
# cleanup non-reusable certificates
find /etc/kubernetes/pki -not -name ca.crt -not -name ca.key -type f -delete

kubeadm init phase certs etcd-server --config=/tmp/${HOST1}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
kubeadm init phase certs etcd-peer --config=/tmp/${HOST1}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
kubeadm init phase certs etcd-healthcheck-client --config=/tmp/${HOST1}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
kubeadm init phase certs apiserver-etcd-client --config=/tmp/${HOST1}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
cp -R /etc/kubernetes/pki /tmp/${HOST1}/
find /etc/kubernetes/pki -not -name ca.crt -not -name ca.key -type f -delete

kubeadm init phase certs etcd-server --config=/tmp/${HOST0}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
kubeadm init phase certs etcd-peer --config=/tmp/${HOST0}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
kubeadm init phase certs etcd-healthcheck-client --config=/tmp/${HOST0}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
kubeadm init phase certs apiserver-etcd-client --config=/tmp/${HOST0}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
# No need to move the certs because they are for HOST0

# clean up certs that should not be copied off this host
find /tmp/${HOST2} -name ca.key -type f -delete
find /tmp/${HOST1} -name ca.key -type f -delete

  5. Copy certificates and kubeadm configs

    The certificates have been generated and now they must be moved to their respective hosts.

    USER=ubuntu
HOST=${HOST1}
scp -r /tmp/${HOST}/* ${USER}@${HOST}:
ssh ${USER}@${HOST}
USER@HOST $ sudo -Es
root@HOST $ chown -R root:root pki
root@HOST $ mv pki /etc/kubernetes/

  6. Ensure all expected files exist

    The complete list of required files on $HOST0 is:

    /tmp/${HOST0}
└── kubeadmcfg.yaml
---
/etc/kubernetes/pki
├── apiserver-etcd-client.crt
├── apiserver-etcd-client.key
└── etcd
    ├── ca.crt
    ├── ca.key
    ├── healthcheck-client.crt
    ├── healthcheck-client.key
    ├── peer.crt
    ├── peer.key
    ├── server.crt
    └── server.key

    On $HOST1:

    $HOME
└── kubeadmcfg.yaml
---
/etc/kubernetes/pki
├── apiserver-etcd-client.crt
├── apiserver-etcd-client.key
└── etcd
    ├── ca.crt
    ├── healthcheck-client.crt
    ├── healthcheck-client.key
    ├── peer.crt
    ├── peer.key
    ├── server.crt
    └── server.key

    On $HOST2

    $HOME
└── kubeadmcfg.yaml
---
/etc/kubernetes/pki
├── apiserver-etcd-client.crt
├── apiserver-etcd-client.key
└── etcd
    ├── ca.crt
    ├── healthcheck-client.crt
    ├── healthcheck-client.key
    ├── peer.crt
    ├── peer.key
    ├── server.crt
    └── server.key

  7. Create the static pod manifests

    Now that the certificates and configs are in place it's time to create the manifests. On each host run the kubeadm command to generate a static manifest for etcd.

    root@HOST0 $ kubeadm init phase etcd local --config=/tmp/${HOST0}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
root@HOST1 $ kubeadm init phase etcd local --config=$HOME/kubeadmcfg.yaml
root@HOST2 $ kubeadm init phase etcd local --config=$HOME/kubeadmcfg.yaml

  8. Optional: Check the cluster health

    docker run --rm -it \
--net host \
-v /etc/kubernetes:/etc/kubernetes k8s.gcr.io/etcd:${ETCD_TAG} etcdctl \
--cert /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/peer.crt \
--key /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/peer.key \
--cacert /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.crt \
--endpoints https://${HOST0}:2379 endpoint health --cluster
...
https://[HOST0 IP]:2379 is healthy: successfully committed proposal: took = 16.283339ms
https://[HOST1 IP]:2379 is healthy: successfully committed proposal: took = 19.44402ms
https://[HOST2 IP]:2379 is healthy: successfully committed proposal: took = 35.926451ms
    • Set ${ETCD_TAG} to the version tag of your etcd image. For example 3.4.3-0. To see the etcd image and tag that kubeadm uses execute kubeadm config images list --kubernetes-version ${K8S_VERSION}, where ${K8S_VERSION} is for example v1.17.0
    • Set ${HOST0}to the IP address of the host you are testing.

What's next

Once you have a working 3 member etcd cluster, you can continue setting up a highly available control plane using the external etcd method with kubeadm.

2.1.8 - Configuring each kubelet in your cluster using kubeadm

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.11 [stable]

The lifecycle of the kubeadm CLI tool is decoupled from the kubelet, which is a daemon that runs on each node within the Kubernetes cluster. The kubeadm CLI tool is executed by the user when Kubernetes is initialized or upgraded, whereas the kubelet is always running in the background.

Since the kubelet is a daemon, it needs to be maintained by some kind of an init system or service manager. When the kubelet is installed using DEBs or RPMs, systemd is configured to manage the kubelet. You can use a different service manager instead, but you need to configure it manually.

Some kubelet configuration details need to be the same across all kubelets involved in the cluster, while other configuration aspects need to be set on a per-kubelet basis to accommodate the different characteristics of a given machine (such as OS, storage, and networking). You can manage the configuration of your kubelets manually, but kubeadm now provides a KubeletConfiguration API type for managing your kubelet configurations centrally.

Kubelet configuration patterns

The following sections describe patterns to kubelet configuration that are simplified by using kubeadm, rather than managing the kubelet configuration for each Node manually.

Propagating cluster-level configuration to each kubelet

You can provide the kubelet with default values to be used by kubeadm init and kubeadm join commands. Interesting examples include using a different container runtime or setting the default subnet used by services.

If you want your services to use the subnet 10.96.0.0/12 as the default for services, you can pass the --service-cidr parameter to kubeadm:

kubeadm init --service-cidr 10.96.0.0/12

Virtual IPs for services are now allocated from this subnet. You also need to set the DNS address used by the kubelet, using the --cluster-dns flag. This setting needs to be the same for every kubelet on every manager and Node in the cluster. The kubelet provides a versioned, structured API object that can configure most parameters in the kubelet and push out this configuration to each running kubelet in the cluster. This object is called KubeletConfiguration. The KubeletConfiguration allows the user to specify flags such as the cluster DNS IP addresses expressed as a list of values to a camelCased key, illustrated by the following example:

apiVersion: kubelet.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: KubeletConfiguration
clusterDNS:
- 10.96.0.10

For more details on the KubeletConfiguration have a look at this section.

Providing instance-specific configuration details

Some hosts require specific kubelet configurations due to differences in hardware, operating system, networking, or other host-specific parameters. The following list provides a few examples.

  • The path to the DNS resolution file, as specified by the --resolv-conf kubelet configuration flag, may differ among operating systems, or depending on whether you are using systemd-resolved. If this path is wrong, DNS resolution will fail on the Node whose kubelet is configured incorrectly.

  • The Node API object .metadata.name is set to the machine's hostname by default, unless you are using a cloud provider. You can use the --hostname-override flag to override the default behavior if you need to specify a Node name different from the machine's hostname.

  • Currently, the kubelet cannot automatically detect the cgroup driver used by the container runtime, but the value of --cgroup-driver must match the cgroup driver used by the container runtime to ensure the health of the kubelet.

  • To specify the container runtime you must set its endpoint with the --container-runtime-endpoint=<path> flag.

You can specify these flags by configuring an individual kubelet's configuration in your service manager, such as systemd.

Configure kubelets using kubeadm

It is possible to configure the kubelet that kubeadm will start if a custom KubeletConfiguration API object is passed with a configuration file like so kubeadm ... --config some-config-file.yaml.

By calling kubeadm config print init-defaults --component-configs KubeletConfiguration you can see all the default values for this structure.

Also have a look at the reference for the KubeletConfiguration for more information on the individual fields.

Workflow when using kubeadm init

When you call kubeadm init, the kubelet configuration is marshalled to disk at /var/lib/kubelet/config.yaml, and also uploaded to a kubelet-config ConfigMap in the kube-system namespace of the cluster. A kubelet configuration file is also written to /etc/kubernetes/kubelet.conf with the baseline cluster-wide configuration for all kubelets in the cluster. This configuration file points to the client certificates that allow the kubelet to communicate with the API server. This addresses the need to propagate cluster-level configuration to each kubelet.

To address the second pattern of providing instance-specific configuration details, kubeadm writes an environment file to /var/lib/kubelet/kubeadm-flags.env, which contains a list of flags to pass to the kubelet when it starts. The flags are presented in the file like this:

KUBELET_KUBEADM_ARGS="--flag1=value1 --flag2=value2 ..."

In addition to the flags used when starting the kubelet, the file also contains dynamic parameters such as the cgroup driver and whether to use a different container runtime socket (--cri-socket).

After marshalling these two files to disk, kubeadm attempts to run the following two commands, if you are using systemd:

systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl restart kubelet

If the reload and restart are successful, the normal kubeadm init workflow continues.

Workflow when using kubeadm join

When you run kubeadm join, kubeadm uses the Bootstrap Token credential to perform a TLS bootstrap, which fetches the credential needed to download the kubelet-config ConfigMap and writes it to /var/lib/kubelet/config.yaml. The dynamic environment file is generated in exactly the same way as kubeadm init.

Next, kubeadm runs the following two commands to load the new configuration into the kubelet:

systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl restart kubelet

After the kubelet loads the new configuration, kubeadm writes the /etc/kubernetes/bootstrap-kubelet.conf KubeConfig file, which contains a CA certificate and Bootstrap Token. These are used by the kubelet to perform the TLS Bootstrap and obtain a unique credential, which is stored in /etc/kubernetes/kubelet.conf.

When the /etc/kubernetes/kubelet.conf file is written, the kubelet has finished performing the TLS Bootstrap. Kubeadm deletes the /etc/kubernetes/bootstrap-kubelet.conf file after completing the TLS Bootstrap.

The kubelet drop-in file for systemd

kubeadm ships with configuration for how systemd should run the kubelet. Note that the kubeadm CLI command never touches this drop-in file.

This configuration file installed by the kubeadm DEB or RPM package is written to /etc/systemd/system/kubelet.service.d/10-kubeadm.conf and is used by systemd. It augments the basic kubelet.service for RPM or kubelet.service for DEB:

[Service]
Environment="KUBELET_KUBECONFIG_ARGS=--bootstrap-kubeconfig=/etc/kubernetes/bootstrap-kubelet.conf --kubeconfig=/etc/kubernetes/kubelet.conf"
Environment="KUBELET_CONFIG_ARGS=--config=/var/lib/kubelet/config.yaml"
# This is a file that "kubeadm init" and "kubeadm join" generate at runtime, populating
the KUBELET_KUBEADM_ARGS variable dynamically
EnvironmentFile=-/var/lib/kubelet/kubeadm-flags.env
# This is a file that the user can use for overrides of the kubelet args as a last resort. Preferably,
# the user should use the .NodeRegistration.KubeletExtraArgs object in the configuration files instead.
# KUBELET_EXTRA_ARGS should be sourced from this file.
EnvironmentFile=-/etc/default/kubelet
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/bin/kubelet $KUBELET_KUBECONFIG_ARGS $KUBELET_CONFIG_ARGS $KUBELET_KUBEADM_ARGS $KUBELET_EXTRA_ARGS

This file specifies the default locations for all of the files managed by kubeadm for the kubelet.

  • The KubeConfig file to use for the TLS Bootstrap is /etc/kubernetes/bootstrap-kubelet.conf, but it is only used if /etc/kubernetes/kubelet.conf does not exist.
  • The KubeConfig file with the unique kubelet identity is /etc/kubernetes/kubelet.conf.
  • The file containing the kubelet's ComponentConfig is /var/lib/kubelet/config.yaml.
  • The dynamic environment file that contains KUBELET_KUBEADM_ARGS is sourced from /var/lib/kubelet/kubeadm-flags.env.
  • The file that can contain user-specified flag overrides with KUBELET_EXTRA_ARGS is sourced from /etc/default/kubelet (for DEBs), or /etc/sysconfig/kubelet (for RPMs). KUBELET_EXTRA_ARGS is last in the flag chain and has the highest priority in the event of conflicting settings.

Kubernetes binaries and package contents

The DEB and RPM packages shipped with the Kubernetes releases are:

Package name Description
kubeadm Installs the /usr/bin/kubeadm CLI tool and the kubelet drop-in file for the kubelet.
kubelet Installs the /usr/bin/kubelet binary.
kubectl Installs the /usr/bin/kubectl binary.
cri-tools Installs the /usr/bin/crictl binary from the cri-tools git repository.
kubernetes-cni Installs the /opt/cni/bin binaries from the plugins git repository.

2.1.9 - Dual-stack support with kubeadm

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.23 [stable]

Your Kubernetes cluster includes dual-stack networking, which means that cluster networking lets you use either address family. In a cluster, the control plane can assign both an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address to a single Pod or a Service.

Before you begin

You need to have installed the kubeadm tool, following the steps from Installing kubeadm.

For each server that you want to use as a node, make sure it allows IPv6 forwarding. On Linux, you can set this by running run sysctl -w net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=1 as the root user on each server.

You need to have an IPv4 and and IPv6 address range to use. Cluster operators typically use private address ranges for IPv4. For IPv6, a cluster operator typically chooses a global unicast address block from within 2000::/3, using a range that is assigned to the operator. You don't have to route the cluster's IP address ranges to the public internet.

The size of the IP address allocations should be suitable for the number of Pods and Services that you are planning to run.

Create a dual-stack cluster

To create a dual-stack cluster with kubeadm init you can pass command line arguments similar to the following example:

# These address ranges are examples
kubeadm init --pod-network-cidr=10.244.0.0/16,2001:db8:42:0::/56 --service-cidr=10.96.0.0/16,2001:db8:42:1::/112

To make things clearer, here is an example kubeadm configuration file kubeadm-config.yaml for the primary dual-stack control plane node.

---
apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta3
kind: ClusterConfiguration
networking:
  podSubnet: 10.244.0.0/16,2001:db8:42:0::/56
  serviceSubnet: 10.96.0.0/16,2001:db8:42:1::/112
---
apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta3
kind: InitConfiguration
localAPIEndpoint:
  advertiseAddress: "10.100.0.1"
  bindPort: 6443
nodeRegistration:
  kubeletExtraArgs:
    node-ip: 10.100.0.2,fd00:1:2:3::2

advertiseAddress in InitConfiguration specifies the IP address that the API Server will advertise it is listening on. The value of advertiseAddress equals the --apiserver-advertise-address flag of kubeadm init

Run kubeadm to initiate the dual-stack control plane node:

kubeadm init --config=kubeadm-config.yaml

The kube-controller-manager flags --node-cidr-mask-size-ipv4|--node-cidr-mask-size-ipv6 are set with default values. See configure IPv4/IPv6 dual stack.

Join a node to dual-stack cluster

Before joining a node, make sure that the node has IPv6 routable network interface and allows IPv6 forwarding.

Here is an example kubeadm configuration file kubeadm-config.yaml for joining a worker node to the cluster.

apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta3
kind: JoinConfiguration
discovery:
  bootstrapToken:
    apiServerEndpoint: 10.100.0.1:6443
    token: "clvldh.vjjwg16ucnhp94qr"
    caCertHashes:
    - "sha256:a4863cde706cfc580a439f842cc65d5ef112b7b2be31628513a9881cf0d9fe0e"
    # change auth info above to match the actual token and CA certificate hash for your cluster
nodeRegistration:
  kubeletExtraArgs:
    node-ip: 10.100.0.3,fd00:1:2:3::3

Also, here is an example kubeadm configuration file kubeadm-config.yaml for joining another control plane node to the cluster.

apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta3
kind: JoinConfiguration
controlPlane:
  localAPIEndpoint:
    advertiseAddress: "10.100.0.2"
    bindPort: 6443
discovery:
  bootstrapToken:
    apiServerEndpoint: 10.100.0.1:6443
    token: "clvldh.vjjwg16ucnhp94qr"
    caCertHashes:
    - "sha256:a4863cde706cfc580a439f842cc65d5ef112b7b2be31628513a9881cf0d9fe0e"
    # change auth info above to match the actual token and CA certificate hash for your cluster
nodeRegistration:
  kubeletExtraArgs:
    node-ip: 10.100.0.4,fd00:1:2:3::4

advertiseAddress in JoinConfiguration.controlPlane specifies the IP address that the API Server will advertise it is listening on. The value of advertiseAddress equals the --apiserver-advertise-address flag of kubeadm join.

kubeadm join --config=kubeadm-config.yaml

Create a single-stack cluster

To make things more clear, here is an example kubeadm configuration file kubeadm-config.yaml for the single-stack control plane node.

apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta3
kind: ClusterConfiguration
networking:
  podSubnet: 10.244.0.0/16
  serviceSubnet: 10.96.0.0/16

What's next

2.2 - Installing Kubernetes with kops

This quickstart shows you how to easily install a Kubernetes cluster on AWS. It uses a tool called kops.

kops is an automated provisioning system:

  • Fully automated installation
  • Uses DNS to identify clusters
  • Self-healing: everything runs in Auto-Scaling Groups
  • Multiple OS support (Debian, Ubuntu 16.04 supported, CentOS & RHEL, Amazon Linux and CoreOS) - see the images.md
  • High-Availability support - see the high_availability.md
  • Can directly provision, or generate terraform manifests - see the terraform.md

Before you begin

Creating a cluster

(1/5) Install kops

Installation

Download kops from the releases page (it is also convenient to build from source):

Download the latest release with the command:

curl -LO https://github.com/kubernetes/kops/releases/download/$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/kubernetes/kops/releases/latest | grep tag_name | cut -d '"' -f 4)/kops-darwin-amd64

To download a specific version, replace the following portion of the command with the specific kops version.

$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/kubernetes/kops/releases/latest | grep tag_name | cut -d '"' -f 4)

For example, to download kops version v1.20.0 type:

curl -LO https://github.com/kubernetes/kops/releases/download/v1.20.0/kops-darwin-amd64

Make the kops binary executable.

chmod +x kops-darwin-amd64

Move the kops binary in to your PATH.

sudo mv kops-darwin-amd64 /usr/local/bin/kops

You can also install kops using Homebrew.

brew update && brew install kops

Download the latest release with the command:

curl -LO https://github.com/kubernetes/kops/releases/download/$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/kubernetes/kops/releases/latest | grep tag_name | cut -d '"' -f 4)/kops-linux-amd64

To download a specific version of kops, replace the following portion of the command with the specific kops version.

$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/kubernetes/kops/releases/latest | grep tag_name | cut -d '"' -f 4)

For example, to download kops version v1.20.0 type:

curl -LO https://github.com/kubernetes/kops/releases/download/v1.20.0/kops-linux-amd64

Make the kops binary executable

chmod +x kops-linux-amd64

Move the kops binary in to your PATH.

sudo mv kops-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/kops

You can also install kops using Homebrew.

brew update && brew install kops

(2/5) Create a route53 domain for your cluster

kops uses DNS for discovery, both inside the cluster and outside, so that you can reach the kubernetes API server from clients.

kops has a strong opinion on the cluster name: it should be a valid DNS name. By doing so you will no longer get your clusters confused, you can share clusters with your colleagues unambiguously, and you can reach them without relying on remembering an IP address.

You can, and probably should, use subdomains to divide your clusters. As our example we will use useast1.dev.example.com. The API server endpoint will then be api.useast1.dev.example.com.

A Route53 hosted zone can serve subdomains. Your hosted zone could be useast1.dev.example.com, but also dev.example.com or even example.com. kops works with any of these, so typically you choose for organization reasons (e.g. you are allowed to create records under dev.example.com, but not under example.com).

Let's assume you're using dev.example.com as your hosted zone. You create that hosted zone using the normal process, or with a command such as aws route53 create-hosted-zone --name dev.example.com --caller-reference 1.

You must then set up your NS records in the parent domain, so that records in the domain will resolve. Here, you would create NS records in example.com for dev. If it is a root domain name you would configure the NS records at your domain registrar (e.g. example.com would need to be configured where you bought example.com).

Verify your route53 domain setup (it is the #1 cause of problems!). You can double-check that your cluster is configured correctly if you have the dig tool by running:

dig NS dev.example.com

You should see the 4 NS records that Route53 assigned your hosted zone.

(3/5) Create an S3 bucket to store your clusters state

kops lets you manage your clusters even after installation. To do this, it must keep track of the clusters that you have created, along with their configuration, the keys they are using etc. This information is stored in an S3 bucket. S3 permissions are used to control access to the bucket.

Multiple clusters can use the same S3 bucket, and you can share an S3 bucket between your colleagues that administer the same clusters - this is much easier than passing around kubecfg files. But anyone with access to the S3 bucket will have administrative access to all your clusters, so you don't want to share it beyond the operations team.

So typically you have one S3 bucket for each ops team (and often the name will correspond to the name of the hosted zone above!)

In our example, we chose dev.example.com as our hosted zone, so let's pick clusters.dev.example.com as the S3 bucket name.

  • Export AWS_PROFILE (if you need to select a profile for the AWS CLI to work)

  • Create the S3 bucket using aws s3 mb s3://clusters.dev.example.com

  • You can export KOPS_STATE_STORE=s3://clusters.dev.example.com and then kops will use this location by default. We suggest putting this in your bash profile or similar.

(4/5) Build your cluster configuration

Run kops create cluster to create your cluster configuration:

kops create cluster --zones=us-east-1c useast1.dev.example.com

kops will create the configuration for your cluster. Note that it only creates the configuration, it does not actually create the cloud resources - you'll do that in the next step with a kops update cluster. This give you an opportunity to review the configuration or change it.

It prints commands you can use to explore further:

  • List your clusters with: kops get cluster
  • Edit this cluster with: kops edit cluster useast1.dev.example.com
  • Edit your node instance group: kops edit ig --name=useast1.dev.example.com nodes
  • Edit your master instance group: kops edit ig --name=useast1.dev.example.com master-us-east-1c

If this is your first time using kops, do spend a few minutes to try those out! An instance group is a set of instances, which will be registered as kubernetes nodes. On AWS this is implemented via auto-scaling-groups. You can have several instance groups, for example if you wanted nodes that are a mix of spot and on-demand instances, or GPU and non-GPU instances.

(5/5) Create the cluster in AWS

Run "kops update cluster" to create your cluster in AWS:

kops update cluster useast1.dev.example.com --yes

That takes a few seconds to run, but then your cluster will likely take a few minutes to actually be ready. kops update cluster will be the tool you'll use whenever you change the configuration of your cluster; it applies the changes you have made to the configuration to your cluster - reconfiguring AWS or kubernetes as needed.

For example, after you kops edit ig nodes, then kops update cluster --yes to apply your configuration, and sometimes you will also have to kops rolling-update cluster to roll out the configuration immediately.

Without --yes, kops update cluster will show you a preview of what it is going to do. This is handy for production clusters!

Explore other add-ons

See the list of add-ons to explore other add-ons, including tools for logging, monitoring, network policy, visualization, and control of your Kubernetes cluster.

Cleanup

  • To delete your cluster: kops delete cluster useast1.dev.example.com --yes

What's next

2.3 - Installing Kubernetes with Kubespray

This quickstart helps to install a Kubernetes cluster hosted on GCE, Azure, OpenStack, AWS, vSphere, Packet (bare metal), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (Experimental) or Baremetal with Kubespray.

Kubespray is a composition of Ansible playbooks, inventory, provisioning tools, and domain knowledge for generic OS/Kubernetes clusters configuration management tasks. Kubespray provides:

  • a highly available cluster
  • composable attributes
  • support for most popular Linux distributions
    • Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, 20.04
    • CentOS/RHEL/Oracle Linux 7, 8
    • Debian Buster, Jessie, Stretch, Wheezy
    • Fedora 31, 32
    • Fedora CoreOS
    • openSUSE Leap 15
    • Flatcar Container Linux by Kinvolk
  • continuous integration tests

To choose a tool which best fits your use case, read this comparison to kubeadm and kops.

Creating a cluster

(1/5) Meet the underlay requirements

Provision servers with the following requirements:

  • Ansible v2.9 and python-netaddr are installed on the machine that will run Ansible commands
  • Jinja 2.11 (or newer) is required to run the Ansible Playbooks
  • The target servers must have access to the Internet in order to pull docker images. Otherwise, additional configuration is required (See Offline Environment)
  • The target servers are configured to allow IPv4 forwarding
  • Your ssh key must be copied to all the servers in your inventory
  • Firewalls are not managed by kubespray. You'll need to implement appropriate rules as needed. You should disable your firewall in order to avoid any issues during deployment
  • If kubespray is run from a non-root user account, correct privilege escalation method should be configured in the target servers and the ansible_become flag or command parameters --become or -b should be specified

Kubespray provides the following utilities to help provision your environment:

(2/5) Compose an inventory file

After you provision your servers, create an inventory file for Ansible. You can do this manually or via a dynamic inventory script. For more information, see "Building your own inventory".

(3/5) Plan your cluster deployment

Kubespray provides the ability to customize many aspects of the deployment:

  • Choice deployment mode: kubeadm or non-kubeadm
  • CNI (networking) plugins
  • DNS configuration
  • Choice of control plane: native/binary or containerized
  • Component versions
  • Calico route reflectors
  • Component runtime options
  • Certificate generation methods

Kubespray customizations can be made to a variable file. If you are getting started with Kubespray, consider using the Kubespray defaults to deploy your cluster and explore Kubernetes.

(4/5) Deploy a Cluster

Next, deploy your cluster:

Cluster deployment using ansible-playbook.

ansible-playbook -i your/inventory/inventory.ini cluster.yml -b -v \
  --private-key=~/.ssh/private_key

Large deployments (100+ nodes) may require specific adjustments for best results.

(5/5) Verify the deployment

Kubespray provides a way to verify inter-pod connectivity and DNS resolve with Netchecker. Netchecker ensures the netchecker-agents pods can resolve DNS requests and ping each over within the default namespace. Those pods mimic similar behavior as the rest of the workloads and serve as cluster health indicators.

Cluster operations

Kubespray provides additional playbooks to manage your cluster: scale and upgrade.

Scale your cluster

You can add worker nodes from your cluster by running the scale playbook. For more information, see "Adding nodes". You can remove worker nodes from your cluster by running the remove-node playbook. For more information, see "Remove nodes".

Upgrade your cluster

You can upgrade your cluster by running the upgrade-cluster playbook. For more information, see "Upgrades".

Cleanup

You can reset your nodes and wipe out all components installed with Kubespray via the reset playbook.

Feedback

What's next

Check out planned work on Kubespray's roadmap.

3 - Turnkey Cloud Solutions

This page provides a list of Kubernetes certified solution providers. From each provider page, you can learn how to install and setup production ready clusters.

4 - Windows in Kubernetes

4.1 - Windows containers in Kubernetes

Windows applications constitute a large portion of the services and applications that run in many organizations. Windows containers provide a way to encapsulate processes and package dependencies, making it easier to use DevOps practices and follow cloud native patterns for Windows applications.

Organizations with investments in Windows-based applications and Linux-based applications don't have to look for separate orchestrators to manage their workloads, leading to increased operational efficiencies across their deployments, regardless of operating system.

Windows nodes in Kubernetes

To enable the orchestration of Windows containers in Kubernetes, include Windows nodes in your existing Linux cluster. Scheduling Windows containers in Pods on Kubernetes is similar to scheduling Linux-based containers.

In order to run Windows containers, your Kubernetes cluster must include multiple operating systems. While you can only run the control plane on Linux, you can deploy worker nodes running either Windows or Linux depending on your workload needs.

Windows nodes are supported provided that the operating system is Windows Server 2019.

This document uses the term Windows containers to mean Windows containers with process isolation. Kubernetes does not support running Windows containers with Hyper-V isolation.

Compatibility and limitations

Some node features are only available if you use a specific container runtime; others are not available on Windows nodes, including:

  • HugePages: not supported for Windows containers
  • Privileged containers: not supported for Windows containers
  • TerminationGracePeriod: requires containerD

Not all features of shared namespaces are supported. See API compatibility for more details.

See Windows OS version compatibility for details on the Windows versions that Kubernetes is tested against.

From an API and kubectl perspective, Windows containers behave in much the same way as Linux-based containers. However, there are some notable differences in key functionality which are outlined in this section.

Comparison with Linux

Key Kubernetes elements work the same way in Windows as they do in Linux. This section refers to several key workload enablers and how they map to Windows.

  • Pods

    A Pod is the basic building block of Kubernetes–the smallest and simplest unit in the Kubernetes object model that you create or deploy. You may not deploy Windows and Linux containers in the same Pod. All containers in a Pod are scheduled onto a single Node where each Node represents a specific platform and architecture. The following Pod capabilities, properties and events are supported with Windows containers:

    • Single or multiple containers per Pod with process isolation and volume sharing

    • Pod status fields

    • Readiness and Liveness probes

    • postStart & preStop container lifecycle events

    • ConfigMap, Secrets: as environment variables or volumes

    • emptyDir volumes

    • Named pipe host mounts

    • Resource limits

    • OS field:

      The .spec.os.name field should be set to windows to indicate that the current Pod uses Windows containers. The IdentifyPodOS feature gate needs to be enabled for this field to be recognized and used by control plane components and kubelet.

      If the IdentifyPodOS feature gate is enabled and you set the .spec.os.name field to windows, you must not set the following fields in the .spec of that Pod:

      • spec.hostPID
      • spec.hostIPC
      • spec.securityContext.seLinuxOptions
      • spec.securityContext.seccompProfile
      • spec.securityContext.fsGroup
      • spec.securityContext.fsGroupChangePolicy
      • spec.securityContext.sysctls
      • spec.shareProcessNamespace
      • spec.securityContext.runAsUser
      • spec.securityContext.runAsGroup
      • spec.securityContext.supplementalGroups
      • spec.containers[*].securityContext.seLinuxOptions
      • spec.containers[*].securityContext.seccompProfile
      • spec.containers[*].securityContext.capabilities
      • spec.containers[*].securityContext.readOnlyRootFilesystem
      • spec.containers[*].securityContext.privileged
      • spec.containers[*].securityContext.allowPrivilegeEscalation
      • spec.containers[*].securityContext.procMount
      • spec.containers[*].securityContext.runAsUser
      • spec.containers[*].securityContext.runAsGroup

      In the above list, wildcards (*) indicate all elements in a list. For example, spec.containers[*].securityContext refers to the SecurityContext object for all containers. If any of these fields is specified, the Pod will not be admited by the API server.

  • Workload resources including:

    • ReplicaSet
    • Deployments
    • StatefulSets
    • DaemonSet
    • Job
    • CronJob
    • ReplicationController

  • Services See Load balancing and Services for more details.

Pods, workload resources, and Services are critical elements to managing Windows workloads on Kubernetes. However, on their own they are not enough to enable the proper lifecycle management of Windows workloads in a dynamic cloud native environment. Kubernetes also supports:

Networking on Windows nodes

Networking for Windows containers is exposed through CNI plugins. Windows containers function similarly to virtual machines in regards to networking. Each container has a virtual network adapter (vNIC) which is connected to a Hyper-V virtual switch (vSwitch). The Host Networking Service (HNS) and the Host Compute Service (HCS) work together to create containers and attach container vNICs to networks. HCS is responsible for the management of containers whereas HNS is responsible for the management of networking resources such as:

  • Virtual networks (including creation of vSwitches)
  • Endpoints / vNICs
  • Namespaces
  • Policies including packet encapsulations, load-balancing rules, ACLs, and NAT rules.

Container networking

The Windows HNS and vSwitch implement namespacing and can create virtual NICs as needed for a pod or container. However, many configurations such as DNS, routes, and metrics are stored in the Windows registry database rather than as files inside /etc, which is how Linux stores those configurations. The Windows registry for the container is separate from that of the host, so concepts like mapping /etc/resolv.conf from the host into a container don't have the same effect they would on Linux. These must be configured using Windows APIs run in the context of that container. Therefore CNI implementations need to call the HNS instead of relying on file mappings to pass network details into the pod or container.

The following networking functionality is not supported on Windows nodes:

  • Host networking mode
  • Local NodePort access from the node itself (works for other nodes or external clients)
  • More than 64 backend pods (or unique destination addresses) for a single Service
  • IPv6 communication between Windows pods connected to overlay networks
  • Local Traffic Policy in non-DSR mode
  • Outbound communication using the ICMP protocol via the win-overlay, win-bridge, or using the Azure-CNI plugin.
    Specifically, the Windows data plane (VFP) doesn't support ICMP packet transpositions, and this means:
    • ICMP packets directed to destinations within the same network (such as pod to pod communication via ping) work as expected and without any limitations;
    • TCP/UDP packets work as expected and without any limitations;
    • ICMP packets directed to pass through a remote network (e.g. pod to external internet communication via ping) cannot be transposed and thus will not be routed back to their source;
    • Since TCP/UDP packets can still be transposed, you can substitute ping <destination> with curl <destination> to get some debugging insight into connectivity with the outside world.

Overlay networking support in kube-proxy is a beta feature. In addition, it requires KB4482887 to be installed on Windows Server 2019.

Network modes

Windows supports five different networking drivers/modes: L2bridge, L2tunnel, Overlay (beta), Transparent, and NAT. In a heterogeneous cluster with Windows and Linux worker nodes, you need to select a networking solution that is compatible on both Windows and Linux. The following out-of-tree plugins are supported on Windows, with recommendations on when to use each CNI:

Network Driver Description Container Packet Modifications Network Plugins Network Plugin Characteristics
L2bridge Containers are attached to an external vSwitch. Containers are attached to the underlay network, although the physical network doesn't need to learn the container MACs because they are rewritten on ingress/egress. MAC is rewritten to host MAC, IP may be rewritten to host IP using HNS OutboundNAT policy. win-bridge, Azure-CNI, Flannel host-gateway uses win-bridge win-bridge uses L2bridge network mode, connects containers to the underlay of hosts, offering best performance. Requires user-defined routes (UDR) for inter-node connectivity.
L2Tunnel This is a special case of l2bridge, but only used on Azure. All packets are sent to the virtualization host where SDN policy is applied. MAC rewritten, IP visible on the underlay network Azure-CNI Azure-CNI allows integration of containers with Azure vNET, and allows them to leverage the set of capabilities that Azure Virtual Network provides. For example, securely connect to Azure services or use Azure NSGs. See azure-cni for some examples
Overlay (Overlay networking for Windows in Kubernetes is in alpha stage) Containers are given a vNIC connected to an external vSwitch. Each overlay network gets its own IP subnet, defined by a custom IP prefix.The overlay network driver uses VXLAN encapsulation. Encapsulated with an outer header. win-overlay, Flannel VXLAN (uses win-overlay) win-overlay should be used when virtual container networks are desired to be isolated from underlay of hosts (e.g. for security reasons). Allows for IPs to be re-used for different overlay networks (which have different VNID tags) if you are restricted on IPs in your datacenter. This option requires KB4489899 on Windows Server 2019.
Transparent (special use case for ovn-kubernetes) Requires an external vSwitch. Containers are attached to an external vSwitch which enables intra-pod communication via logical networks (logical switches and routers). Packet is encapsulated either via GENEVE or STT tunneling to reach pods which are not on the same host.
Packets are forwarded or dropped via the tunnel metadata information supplied by the ovn network controller.
NAT is done for north-south communication.		 ovn-kubernetes Deploy via ansible. Distributed ACLs can be applied via Kubernetes policies. IPAM support. Load-balancing can be achieved without kube-proxy. NATing is done without using iptables/netsh.
NAT (not used in Kubernetes) Containers are given a vNIC connected to an internal vSwitch. DNS/DHCP is provided using an internal component called WinNAT MAC and IP is rewritten to host MAC/IP. nat Included here for completeness

As outlined above, the Flannel CNI meta plugin is also supported on Windows via the VXLAN network backend (alpha support ; delegates to win-overlay) and host-gateway network backend (stable support; delegates to win-bridge).

This plugin supports delegating to one of the reference CNI plugins (win-overlay, win-bridge), to work in conjunction with Flannel daemon on Windows (Flanneld) for automatic node subnet lease assignment and HNS network creation. This plugin reads in its own configuration file (cni.conf), and aggregates it with the environment variables from the FlannelD generated subnet.env file. It then delegates to one of the reference CNI plugins for network plumbing, and sends the correct configuration containing the node-assigned subnet to the IPAM plugin (for example: host-local).

For Node, Pod, and Service objects, the following network flows are supported for TCP/UDP traffic:

  • Pod → Pod (IP)
  • Pod → Pod (Name)
  • Pod → Service (Cluster IP)
  • Pod → Service (PQDN, but only if there are no ".")
  • Pod → Service (FQDN)
  • Pod → external (IP)
  • Pod → external (DNS)
  • Node → Pod
  • Pod → Node

CNI plugin limitations

  • Windows reference network plugins win-bridge and win-overlay do not implement CNI spec v0.4.0, due to a missing CHECK implementation.
  • The Flannel VXLAN CNI plugin has the following limitations on Windows:
  1. Node-pod connectivity isn't possible by design. It's only possible for local pods with Flannel v0.12.0 (or higher).
  2. Flannel is restricted to using VNI 4096 and UDP port 4789. See the official Flannel VXLAN backend docs for more details on these parameters.

IP address management (IPAM)

The following IPAM options are supported on Windows:

Load balancing and Services

A Kubernetes Service is an abstraction that defines a logical set of Pods and a means to access them over a network. In a cluster that includes Windows nodes, you can use the following types of Service:

  • NodePort
  • ClusterIP
  • LoadBalancer
  • ExternalName

Windows container networking differs in some important ways from Linux networking. The Microsoft documentation for Windows Container Networking provides additional details and background.

On Windows, you can use the following settings to configure Services and load balancing behavior:

Windows Service Settings
Feature Description Supported Kubernetes version Supported Windows OS build How to enable
Session affinity Ensures that connections from a particular client are passed to the same Pod each time. v1.20+ Windows Server vNext Insider Preview Build 19551 (or higher) Set service.spec.sessionAffinity to "ClientIP"
Direct Server Return (DSR) Load balancing mode where the IP address fixups and the LBNAT occurs at the container vSwitch port directly; service traffic arrives with the source IP set as the originating pod IP. v1.20+ Windows Server 2019 Set the following flags in kube-proxy: --feature-gates="WinDSR=true" --enable-dsr=true
Preserve-Destination Skips DNAT of service traffic, thereby preserving the virtual IP of the target service in packets reaching the backend Pod. Also disables node-node forwarding. v1.20+ Windows Server, version 1903 (or higher) Set "preserve-destination": "true" in service annotations and enable DSR in kube-proxy.
IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack networking Native IPv4-to-IPv4 in parallel with IPv6-to-IPv6 communications to, from, and within a cluster v1.19+ Windows Server, version 2019 See IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack
Client IP preservation Ensures that source IP of incoming ingress traffic gets preserved. Also disables node-node forwarding. v1.20+ Windows Server, version 2019 Set service.spec.externalTrafficPolicy to "Local" and enable DSR in kube-proxy
Session affinity

Setting the maximum session sticky time for Windows services using service.spec.sessionAffinityConfig.clientIP.timeoutSeconds is not supported.

DNS

  • ClusterFirstWithHostNet is not supported for DNS. Windows treats all names with a . as a FQDN and skips FQDN resolution
  • On Linux, you have a DNS suffix list, which is used when trying to resolve PQDNs. On Windows, you can only have 1 DNS suffix, which is the DNS suffix associated with that pod's namespace (mydns.svc.cluster.local for example). Windows can resolve FQDNs and services or names resolvable with just that suffix. For example, a pod spawned in the default namespace, will have the DNS suffix default.svc.cluster.local. Inside a Windows pod, you can resolve both kubernetes.default.svc.cluster.local and kubernetes, but not the in-betweens, like kubernetes.default or kubernetes.default.svc.
  • On Windows, there are multiple DNS resolvers that can be used. As these come with slightly different behaviors, using the Resolve-DNSName utility for name query resolutions is recommended.

IPv6 networking

Kubernetes on Windows does not support single-stack "IPv6-only" networking. However, dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 networking for pods and nodes with single-family services is supported.

You can use IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack networking with l2bridge networks. See configure IPv4/IPv6 dual stack for more details.

Persistent storage

Windows has a layered filesystem driver to mount container layers and create a copy filesystem based on NTFS. All file paths in the container are resolved only within the context of that container.

  • With Docker, volume mounts can only target a directory in the container, and not an individual file. This limitation does not exist with CRI-containerD runtime.
  • Volume mounts cannot project files or directories back to the host filesystem.
  • Read-only filesystems are not supported because write access is always required for the Windows registry and SAM database. However, read-only volumes are supported.
  • Volume user-masks and permissions are not available. Because the SAM is not shared between the host & container, there's no mapping between them. All permissions are resolved within the context of the container.

As a result, the following storage functionality is not supported on Windows nodes:

  • Volume subpath mounts: only the entire volume can be mounted in a Windows container
  • Subpath volume mounting for Secrets
  • Host mount projection
  • Read-only root filesystem (mapped volumes still support readOnly)
  • Block device mapping
  • Memory as the storage medium (for example, emptyDir.medium set to Memory)
  • File system features like uid/gid; per-user Linux filesystem permissions
  • DefaultMode (due to UID/GID dependency)
  • NFS based storage/volume support
  • Expanding the mounted volume (resizefs)

Kubernetes volumes enable complex applications, with data persistence and Pod volume sharing requirements, to be deployed on Kubernetes. Management of persistent volumes associated with a specific storage back-end or protocol includes actions such as provisioning/de-provisioning/resizing of volumes, attaching/detaching a volume to/from a Kubernetes node and mounting/dismounting a volume to/from individual containers in a pod that needs to persist data.

The code implementing these volume management actions for a specific storage back-end or protocol is shipped in the form of a Kubernetes volume plugin. The following broad classes of Kubernetes volume plugins are supported on Windows:

In-tree volume plugins

Code associated with in-tree volume plugins ship as part of the core Kubernetes code base. Deployment of in-tree volume plugins do not require installation of additional scripts or deployment of separate containerized plugin components. These plugins can handle provisioning/de-provisioning and resizing of volumes in the storage backend, attaching/detaching of volumes to/from a Kubernetes node and mounting/dismounting a volume to/from individual containers in a pod. The following in-tree plugins support persistent storage on Windows nodes:

FlexVolume plugins

Code associated with FlexVolume plugins ship as out-of-tree scripts or binaries that need to be deployed directly on the host. FlexVolume plugins handle attaching/detaching of volumes to/from a Kubernetes node and mounting/dismounting a volume to/from individual containers in a pod. Provisioning/De-provisioning of persistent volumes associated with FlexVolume plugins may be handled through an external provisioner that is typically separate from the FlexVolume plugins. The following FlexVolume plugins, deployed as PowerShell scripts on the host, support Windows nodes:

CSI plugins

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.19 [beta]

Code associated with CSI plugins ship as out-of-tree scripts and binaries that are typically distributed as container images and deployed using standard Kubernetes constructs like DaemonSets and StatefulSets. CSI plugins handle a wide range of volume management actions in Kubernetes: provisioning/de-provisioning/resizing of volumes, attaching/detaching of volumes to/from a Kubernetes node and mounting/dismounting a volume to/from individual containers in a pod, backup/restore of persistent data using snapshots and cloning. CSI plugins typically consist of node plugins (that run on each node as a DaemonSet) and controller plugins.

CSI node plugins (especially those associated with persistent volumes exposed as either block devices or over a shared file-system) need to perform various privileged operations like scanning of disk devices, mounting of file systems, etc. These operations differ for each host operating system. For Linux worker nodes, containerized CSI node plugins are typically deployed as privileged containers. For Windows worker nodes, privileged operations for containerized CSI node plugins is supported using csi-proxy, a community-managed, stand-alone binary that needs to be pre-installed on each Windows node.

For more details, refer to the deployment guide of the CSI plugin you wish to deploy.

Command line options for the kubelet

The behavior of some kubelet command line options behave differently on Windows, as described below:

  • The --windows-priorityclass lets you set the scheduling priority of the kubelet process (see CPU resource management)
  • The --kubelet-reserve, --system-reserve , and --eviction-hard flags update NodeAllocatable
  • Eviction by using --enforce-node-allocable is not implemented
  • Eviction by using --eviction-hard and --eviction-soft are not implemented
  • A kubelet running on a Windows node does not have memory restrictions. --kubelet-reserve and --system-reserve do not set limits on kubelet or processes running on the host. This means kubelet or a process on the host could cause memory resource starvation outside the node-allocatable and scheduler.
  • The MemoryPressure Condition is not implemented
  • The kubelet does not take OOM eviction actions

API compatibility

There are no differences in how most of the Kubernetes APIs work for Windows. The subtleties around what's different come down to differences in the OS and container runtime. In certain situations, some properties on workload resources were designed under the assumption that they would be implemented on Linux, and fail to run on Windows.

At a high level, these OS concepts are different:

  • Identity - Linux uses userID (UID) and groupID (GID) which are represented as integer types. User and group names are not canonical - they are just an alias in /etc/groups or /etc/passwd back to UID+GID. Windows uses a larger binary security identifier (SID) which is stored in the Windows Security Access Manager (SAM) database. This database is not shared between the host and containers, or between containers.
  • File permissions - Windows uses an access control list based on (SIDs), whereas POSIX systems such as Linux use a bitmask based on object permissions and UID+GID, plus optional access control lists.
  • File paths - the convention on Windows is to use \ instead of /. The Go IO libraries typically accept both and just make it work, but when you're setting a path or command line that's interpreted inside a container, \ may be needed.
  • Signals - Windows interactive apps handle termination differently, and can implement one or more of these:
    • A UI thread handles well-defined messages including WM_CLOSE.
    • Console apps handle Ctrl-C or Ctrl-break using a Control Handler.
    • Services register a Service Control Handler function that can accept SERVICE_CONTROL_STOP control codes.

Container exit codes follow the same convention where 0 is success, and nonzero is failure. The specific error codes may differ across Windows and Linux. However, exit codes passed from the Kubernetes components (kubelet, kube-proxy) are unchanged.

Field compatibility for container specifications

The following list documents differences between how Pod container specifications work between Windows and Linux:

  • Huge pages are not implemented in the Windows container runtime, and are not available. They require asserting a user privilege that's not configurable for containers.
  • requests.cpu and requests.memory - requests are subtracted from node available resources, so they can be used to avoid overprovisioning a node. However, they cannot be used to guarantee resources in an overprovisioned node. They should be applied to all containers as a best practice if the operator wants to avoid overprovisioning entirely.
  • securityContext.allowPrivilegeEscalation - not possible on Windows; none of the capabilities are hooked up
  • securityContext.capabilities - POSIX capabilities are not implemented on Windows
  • securityContext.privileged - Windows doesn't support privileged containers
  • securityContext.procMount - Windows doesn't have a /proc filesystem
  • securityContext.readOnlyRootFilesystem - not possible on Windows; write access is required for registry & system processes to run inside the container
  • securityContext.runAsGroup - not possible on Windows as there is no GID support
  • securityContext.runAsNonRoot - this setting will prevent containers from running as ContainerAdministrator which is the closest equivalent to a root user on Windows.
  • securityContext.runAsUser - use runAsUserName instead
  • securityContext.seLinuxOptions - not possible on Windows as SELinux is Linux-specific
  • terminationMessagePath - this has some limitations in that Windows doesn't support mapping single files. The default value is /dev/termination-log, which does work because it does not exist on Windows by default.
Field compatibility for Pod specifications

The following list documents differences between how Pod specifications work between Windows and Linux:

  • hostIPC and hostpid - host namespace sharing is not possible on Windows
  • hostNetwork - There is no Windows OS support to share the host network
  • dnsPolicy - setting the Pod dnsPolicy to ClusterFirstWithHostNet is not supported on Windows because host networking is not provided. Pods always run with a container network.
  • podSecurityContext (see below)
  • shareProcessNamespace - this is a beta feature, and depends on Linux namespaces which are not implemented on Windows. Windows cannot share process namespaces or the container's root filesystem. Only the network can be shared.
  • terminationGracePeriodSeconds - this is not fully implemented in Docker on Windows, see the GitHub issue. The behavior today is that the ENTRYPOINT process is sent CTRL_SHUTDOWN_EVENT, then Windows waits 5 seconds by default, and finally shuts down all processes using the normal Windows shutdown behavior. The 5 second default is actually in the Windows registry inside the container, so it can be overridden when the container is built.
  • volumeDevices - this is a beta feature, and is not implemented on Windows. Windows cannot attach raw block devices to pods.
  • volumes
    • If you define an emptyDir volume, you cannot set its volume source to memory.
  • You cannot enable mountPropagation for volume mounts as this is not supported on Windows.
Field compatibility for Pod security context

None of the Pod securityContext fields work on Windows.

Node problem detector

The node problem detector (see Monitor Node Health) is not compatible with Windows.

Pause container

In a Kubernetes Pod, an infrastructure or “pause” container is first created to host the container. In Linux, the cgroups and namespaces that make up a pod need a process to maintain their continued existence; the pause process provides this. Containers that belong to the same pod, including infrastructure and worker containers, share a common network endpoint (same IPv4 and / or IPv6 address, same network port spaces). Kubernetes uses pause containers to allow for worker containers crashing or restarting without losing any of the networking configuration.

Kubernetes maintains a multi-architecture image that includes support for Windows. For Kubernetes v1.24 the recommended pause image is k8s.gcr.io/pause:3.6. The source code is available on GitHub.

Microsoft maintains a different multi-architecture image, with Linux and Windows amd64 support, that you can find as mcr.microsoft.com/oss/kubernetes/pause:3.6. This image is built from the same source as the Kubernetes maintained image but all of the Windows binaries are authenticode signed by Microsoft. The Kubernetes project recommends using the Microsoft maintained image if you are deploying to a production or production-like environment that requires signed binaries.

Container runtimes

You need to install a container runtime into each node in the cluster so that Pods can run there.

The following container runtimes work with Windows:

cri-containerd

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.20 [stable]

You can use ContainerD 1.4.0+ as the container runtime for Kubernetes nodes that run Windows.

Learn how to install ContainerD on a Windows node.

Mirantis Container Runtime

Mirantis Container Runtime (MCR) is available as a container runtime for all Windows Server 2019 and later versions.

See Install MCR on Windows Servers for more information.

Windows OS version compatibility

On Windows nodes, strict compatibility rules apply where the host OS version must match the container base image OS version. Only Windows containers with a container operating system of Windows Server 2019 are fully supported.

For Kubernetes v1.24, operating system compatibility for Windows nodes (and Pods) is as follows:

Windows Server LTSC release
Windows Server 2019
Windows Server 2022
Windows Server SAC release
Windows Server version 20H2

The Kubernetes version-skew policy also applies.

Getting help and troubleshooting

Your main source of help for troubleshooting your Kubernetes cluster should start with the Troubleshooting page.

Some additional, Windows-specific troubleshooting help is included in this section. Logs are an important element of troubleshooting issues in Kubernetes. Make sure to include them any time you seek troubleshooting assistance from other contributors. Follow the instructions in the SIG Windows contributing guide on gathering logs.

Node-level troubleshooting

  1. How do I know start.ps1 completed successfully?

    You should see kubelet, kube-proxy, and (if you chose Flannel as your networking solution) flanneld host-agent processes running on your node, with running logs being displayed in separate PowerShell windows. In addition to this, your Windows node should be listed as "Ready" in your Kubernetes cluster.

  2. Can I configure the Kubernetes node processes to run in the background as services?

    The kubelet and kube-proxy are already configured to run as native Windows Services, offering resiliency by re-starting the services automatically in the event of failure (for example a process crash). You have two options for configuring these node components as services.

    1. As native Windows Services

      You can run the kubelet and kube-proxy as native Windows Services using sc.exe.

      # Create the services for kubelet and kube-proxy in two separate commands
sc.exe create <component_name> binPath= "<path_to_binary> --service <other_args>"

# Please note that if the arguments contain spaces, they must be escaped.
sc.exe create kubelet binPath= "C:\kubelet.exe --service --hostname-override 'minion' <other_args>"

# Start the services
Start-Service kubelet
Start-Service kube-proxy

# Stop the service
Stop-Service kubelet (-Force)
Stop-Service kube-proxy (-Force)

# Query the service status
Get-Service kubelet
Get-Service kube-proxy

    2. Using nssm.exe

      You can also always use alternative service managers like nssm.exe to run these processes (flanneld, kubelet & kube-proxy) in the background for you. You can use this sample script, leveraging nssm.exe to register kubelet, kube-proxy, and flanneld.exe to run as Windows services in the background.

      register-svc.ps1 -NetworkMode <Network mode> -ManagementIP <Windows Node IP> -ClusterCIDR <Cluster subnet> -KubeDnsServiceIP <Kube-dns Service IP> -LogDir <Directory to place logs>

# NetworkMode      = The network mode l2bridge (flannel host-gw, also the default value) or overlay (flannel vxlan) chosen as a network solution
# ManagementIP     = The IP address assigned to the Windows node. You can use ipconfig to find this
# ClusterCIDR      = The cluster subnet range. (Default value 10.244.0.0/16)
# KubeDnsServiceIP = The Kubernetes DNS service IP (Default value 10.96.0.10)
# LogDir           = The directory where kubelet and kube-proxy logs are redirected into their respective output files (Default value C:\k)

      If the above referenced script is not suitable, you can manually configure nssm.exe using the following examples.

      # Register flanneld.exe
nssm install flanneld C:\flannel\flanneld.exe
nssm set flanneld AppParameters --kubeconfig-file=c:\k\config --iface=<ManagementIP> --ip-masq=1 --kube-subnet-mgr=1
nssm set flanneld AppEnvironmentExtra NODE_NAME=<hostname>
nssm set flanneld AppDirectory C:\flannel
nssm start flanneld

# Register kubelet.exe
# Microsoft releases the pause infrastructure container at mcr.microsoft.com/oss/kubernetes/pause:3.6
nssm install kubelet C:\k\kubelet.exe
nssm set kubelet AppParameters --hostname-override=<hostname> --v=6 --pod-infra-container-image=mcr.microsoft.com/oss/kubernetes/pause:3.6 --resolv-conf="" --allow-privileged=true --enable-debugging-handlers --cluster-dns=<DNS-service-IP> --cluster-domain=cluster.local --kubeconfig=c:\k\config --hairpin-mode=promiscuous-bridge --image-pull-progress-deadline=20m --cgroups-per-qos=false  --log-dir=<log directory> --logtostderr=false --enforce-node-allocatable="" --network-plugin=cni --cni-bin-dir=c:\k\cni --cni-conf-dir=c:\k\cni\config
nssm set kubelet AppDirectory C:\k
nssm start kubelet

# Register kube-proxy.exe (l2bridge / host-gw)
nssm install kube-proxy C:\k\kube-proxy.exe
nssm set kube-proxy AppDirectory c:\k
nssm set kube-proxy AppParameters --v=4 --proxy-mode=kernelspace --hostname-override=<hostname>--kubeconfig=c:\k\config --enable-dsr=false --log-dir=<log directory> --logtostderr=false
nssm.exe set kube-proxy AppEnvironmentExtra KUBE_NETWORK=cbr0
nssm set kube-proxy DependOnService kubelet
nssm start kube-proxy

# Register kube-proxy.exe (overlay / vxlan)
nssm install kube-proxy C:\k\kube-proxy.exe
nssm set kube-proxy AppDirectory c:\k
nssm set kube-proxy AppParameters --v=4 --proxy-mode=kernelspace --feature-gates="WinOverlay=true" --hostname-override=<hostname> --kubeconfig=c:\k\config --network-name=vxlan0 --source-vip=<source-vip> --enable-dsr=false --log-dir=<log directory> --logtostderr=false
nssm set kube-proxy DependOnService kubelet
nssm start kube-proxy

      For initial troubleshooting, you can use the following flags in nssm.exe to redirect stdout and stderr to a output file:

      nssm set <Service Name> AppStdout C:\k\mysvc.log
nssm set <Service Name> AppStderr C:\k\mysvc.log

      For additional details, see NSSM - the Non-Sucking Service Manager.

  3. My Pods are stuck at "Container Creating" or restarting over and over

    Check that your pause image is compatible with your OS version. The instructions assume that both the OS and the containers are version 1803. If you have a later version of Windows, such as an Insider build, you need to adjust the images accordingly. See Pause container for more details.

Network troubleshooting

  1. My Windows Pods do not have network connectivity

    If you are using virtual machines, ensure that MAC spoofing is enabled on all the VM network adapter(s).

  2. My Windows Pods cannot ping external resources

    Windows Pods do not have outbound rules programmed for the ICMP protocol. However, TCP/UDP is supported. When trying to demonstrate connectivity to resources outside of the cluster, substitute ping <IP> with corresponding curl <IP> commands.

    If you are still facing problems, most likely your network configuration in cni.conf deserves some extra attention. You can always edit this static file. The configuration update will apply to any new Kubernetes resources.

    One of the Kubernetes networking requirements (see Kubernetes model) is for cluster communication to occur without NAT internally. To honor this requirement, there is an ExceptionList for all the communication where you do not want outbound NAT to occur. However, this also means that you need to exclude the external IP you are trying to query from the ExceptionList. Only then will the traffic originating from your Windows pods be SNAT'ed correctly to receive a response from the outside world. In this regard, your ExceptionList in cni.conf should look as follows:

    "ExceptionList": [
                "10.244.0.0/16",  # Cluster subnet
                "10.96.0.0/12",   # Service subnet
                "10.127.130.0/24" # Management (host) subnet
            ]

  3. My Windows node cannot access NodePort type Services

    Local NodePort access from the node itself fails. This is a known limitation. NodePort access works from other nodes or external clients.

  4. vNICs and HNS endpoints of containers are being deleted

    This issue can be caused when the hostname-override parameter is not passed to kube-proxy. To resolve it, users need to pass the hostname to kube-proxy as follows:

    C:\k\kube-proxy.exe --hostname-override=$(hostname)

  5. With flannel, my nodes are having issues after rejoining a cluster

    Whenever a previously deleted node is being re-joined to the cluster, flannelD tries to assign a new pod subnet to the node. Users should remove the old pod subnet configuration files in the following paths:

    Remove-Item C:\k\SourceVip.json
Remove-Item C:\k\SourceVipRequest.json

  6. After launching start.ps1, flanneld is stuck in "Waiting for the Network to be created"

    There are numerous reports of this issue; most likely it is a timing issue for when the management IP of the flannel network is set. A workaround is to relaunch start.ps1 or relaunch it manually as follows:

    [Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("NODE_NAME", "<Windows_Worker_Hostname>")
C:\flannel\flanneld.exe --kubeconfig-file=c:\k\config --iface=<Windows_Worker_Node_IP> --ip-masq=1 --kube-subnet-mgr=1

  7. My Windows Pods cannot launch because of missing /run/flannel/subnet.env

    This indicates that Flannel didn't launch correctly. You can either try to restart flanneld.exe or you can copy the files over manually from /run/flannel/subnet.env on the Kubernetes master to C:\run\flannel\subnet.env on the Windows worker node and modify the FLANNEL_SUBNET row to a different number. For example, if node subnet 10.244.4.1/24 is desired:

    FLANNEL_NETWORK=10.244.0.0/16
FLANNEL_SUBNET=10.244.4.1/24
FLANNEL_MTU=1500
FLANNEL_IPMASQ=true

  8. My Windows node cannot access my services using the service IP

    This is a known limitation of the networking stack on Windows. However, Windows Pods can access the Service IP.

  9. No network adapter is found when starting the kubelet

    The Windows networking stack needs a virtual adapter for Kubernetes networking to work. If the following commands return no results (in an admin shell), virtual network creation — a necessary prerequisite for the kubelet to work — has failed:

    Get-HnsNetwork | ? Name -ieq "cbr0"
Get-NetAdapter | ? Name -Like "vEthernet (Ethernet*"

    Often it is worthwhile to modify the InterfaceName parameter of the start.ps1 script, in cases where the host's network adapter isn't "Ethernet". Otherwise, consult the output of the start-kubelet.ps1 script to see if there are errors during virtual network creation.

  10. DNS resolution is not properly working

    Check the DNS limitations for Windows in this section.

  11. kubectl port-forward fails with "unable to do port forwarding: wincat not found"

    This was implemented in Kubernetes 1.15 by including wincat.exe in the pause infrastructure container mcr.microsoft.com/oss/kubernetes/pause:3.6. Be sure to use a supported version of Kubernetes. If you would like to build your own pause infrastructure container be sure to include wincat.

  12. My Kubernetes installation is failing because my Windows Server node is behind a proxy

    If you are behind a proxy, the following PowerShell environment variables must be defined:

    [Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("HTTP_PROXY", "http://proxy.example.com:80/", [EnvironmentVariableTarget]::Machine)
[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("HTTPS_PROXY", "http://proxy.example.com:443/", [EnvironmentVariableTarget]::Machine)

Further investigation

If these steps don't resolve your problem, you can get help running Windows containers on Windows nodes in Kubernetes through:

Reporting issues and feature requests

If you have what looks like a bug, or you would like to make a feature request, please use the GitHub issue tracking system. You can open issues on GitHub and assign them to SIG-Windows. You should first search the list of issues in case it was reported previously and comment with your experience on the issue and add additional logs. SIG-Windows Slack is also a great avenue to get some initial support and troubleshooting ideas prior to creating a ticket.

If filing a bug, please include detailed information about how to reproduce the problem, such as:

  • Kubernetes version: output from kubectl version
  • Environment details: Cloud provider, OS distro, networking choice and configuration, and Docker version
  • Detailed steps to reproduce the problem
  • Relevant logs

It helps if you tag the issue as sig/windows, by commenting on the issue with /sig windows. This helps to bring the issue to a SIG Windows member's attention

What's next

Deployment tools

The kubeadm tool helps you to deploy a Kubernetes cluster, providing the control plane to manage the cluster it, and nodes to run your workloads. Adding Windows nodes explains how to deploy Windows nodes to your cluster using kubeadm.

The Kubernetes cluster API project also provides means to automate deployment of Windows nodes.

Windows distribution channels

For a detailed explanation of Windows distribution channels see the Microsoft documentation.

Information on the different Windows Server servicing channels including their support models can be found at Windows Server servicing channels.

4.2 - Guide for scheduling Windows containers in Kubernetes

Windows applications constitute a large portion of the services and applications that run in many organizations. This guide walks you through the steps to configure and deploy a Windows container in Kubernetes.

Objectives

  • Configure an example deployment to run Windows containers on the Windows node
  • (Optional) Configure an Active Directory Identity for your Pod using Group Managed Service Accounts (GMSA)

Before you begin

  • Create a Kubernetes cluster that includes a control plane and a worker node running Windows Server
  • It is important to note that creating and deploying services and workloads on Kubernetes behaves in much the same way for Linux and Windows containers. Kubectl commands to interface with the cluster are identical. The example in the section below is provided to jumpstart your experience with Windows containers.

Getting Started: Deploying a Windows container

To deploy a Windows container on Kubernetes, you must first create an example application. The example YAML file below creates a simple webserver application. Create a service spec named win-webserver.yaml with the contents below:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: win-webserver
  labels:
    app: win-webserver
spec:
  ports:
    # the port that this service should serve on
    - port: 80
      targetPort: 80
  selector:
    app: win-webserver
  type: NodePort
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  labels:
    app: win-webserver
  name: win-webserver
spec:
  replicas: 2
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: win-webserver
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: win-webserver
      name: win-webserver
    spec:
     containers:
      - name: windowswebserver
        image: mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore:ltsc2019
        command:
        - powershell.exe
        - -command
        - "<#code used from https://gist.github.com/19WAS85/5424431#> ; $$listener = New-Object System.Net.HttpListener ; $$listener.Prefixes.Add('http://*:80/') ; $$listener.Start() ; $$callerCounts = @{} ; Write-Host('Listening at http://*:80/') ; while ($$listener.IsListening) { ;$$context = $$listener.GetContext() ;$$requestUrl = $$context.Request.Url ;$$clientIP = $$context.Request.RemoteEndPoint.Address ;$$response = $$context.Response ;Write-Host '' ;Write-Host('> {0}' -f $$requestUrl) ;  ;$$count = 1 ;$$k=$$callerCounts.Get_Item($$clientIP) ;if ($$k -ne $$null) { $$count += $$k } ;$$callerCounts.Set_Item($$clientIP, $$count) ;$$ip=(Get-NetAdapter | Get-NetIpAddress); $$header='<html><body><H1>Windows Container Web Server</H1>' ;$$callerCountsString='' ;$$callerCounts.Keys | % { $$callerCountsString+='<p>IP {0} callerCount {1} ' -f $$ip[1].IPAddress,$$callerCounts.Item($$_) } ;$$footer='</body></html>' ;$$content='{0}{1}{2}' -f $$header,$$callerCountsString,$$footer ;Write-Output $$content ;$$buffer = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($$content) ;$$response.ContentLength64 = $$buffer.Length ;$$response.OutputStream.Write($$buffer, 0, $$buffer.Length) ;$$response.Close() ;$$responseStatus = $$response.StatusCode ;Write-Host('< {0}' -f $$responseStatus)  } ; "
     nodeSelector:
      kubernetes.io/os: windows

  1. Check that all nodes are healthy:

    kubectl get nodes

  2. Deploy the service and watch for pod updates:

    kubectl apply -f win-webserver.yaml
kubectl get pods -o wide -w

    When the service is deployed correctly both Pods are marked as Ready. To exit the watch command, press Ctrl+C.

  3. Check that the deployment succeeded. To verify:

    • Two containers per pod on the Windows node, use docker ps
    • Two pods listed from the Linux control plane node, use kubectl get pods
    • Node-to-pod communication across the network, curl port 80 of your pod IPs from the Linux control plane node to check for a web server response
    • Pod-to-pod communication, ping between pods (and across hosts, if you have more than one Windows node) using docker exec or kubectl exec
    • Service-to-pod communication, curl the virtual service IP (seen under kubectl get services) from the Linux control plane node and from individual pods
    • Service discovery, curl the service name with the Kubernetes default DNS suffix
    • Inbound connectivity, curl the NodePort from the Linux control plane node or machines outside of the cluster
    • Outbound connectivity, curl external IPs from inside the pod using kubectl exec

Observability

Capturing logs from workloads

Logs are an important element of observability; they enable users to gain insights into the operational aspect of workloads and are a key ingredient to troubleshooting issues. Because Windows containers and workloads inside Windows containers behave differently from Linux containers, users had a hard time collecting logs, limiting operational visibility. Windows workloads for example are usually configured to log to ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) or push entries to the application event log. LogMonitor, an open source tool by Microsoft, is the recommended way to monitor configured log sources inside a Windows container. LogMonitor supports monitoring event logs, ETW providers, and custom application logs, piping them to STDOUT for consumption by kubectl logs <pod>.

Follow the instructions in the LogMonitor GitHub page to copy its binaries and configuration files to all your containers and add the necessary entrypoints for LogMonitor to push your logs to STDOUT.

Using configurable Container usernames

Starting with Kubernetes v1.16, Windows containers can be configured to run their entrypoints and processes with different usernames than the image defaults. The way this is achieved is a bit different from the way it is done for Linux containers. Learn more about it here.

Managing Workload Identity with Group Managed Service Accounts

Starting with Kubernetes v1.14, Windows container workloads can be configured to use Group Managed Service Accounts (GMSA). Group Managed Service Accounts are a specific type of Active Directory account that provides automatic password management, simplified service principal name (SPN) management, and the ability to delegate the management to other administrators across multiple servers. Containers configured with a GMSA can access external Active Directory Domain resources while carrying the identity configured with the GMSA. Learn more about configuring and using GMSA for Windows containers here.

Taints and Tolerations

Users today need to use some combination of taints and node selectors in order to keep Linux and Windows workloads on their respective OS-specific nodes. This likely imposes a burden only on Windows users. The recommended approach is outlined below, with one of its main goals being that this approach should not break compatibility for existing Linux workloads.

If the IdentifyPodOS feature gate is enabled, you can (and should) set .spec.os.name for a Pod to indicate the operating system that the containers in that Pod are designed for. For Pods that run Linux containers, set .spec.os.name to linux. For Pods that run Windows containers, set .spec.os.name to Windows.

The scheduler does not use the value of .spec.os.name when assigning Pods to nodes. You should use normal Kubernetes mechanisms for assigning pods to nodes to ensure that the control plane for your cluster places pods onto nodes that are running the appropriate operating system.

The .spec.os.name value has no effect on the scheduling of the Windows pods, so taints and tolerations and node selectors are still required to ensure that the Windows pods land onto appropriate Windows nodes.

Ensuring OS-specific workloads land on the appropriate container host

Users can ensure Windows containers can be scheduled on the appropriate host using Taints and Tolerations. All Kubernetes nodes today have the following default labels:

  • kubernetes.io/os = [windows|linux]
  • kubernetes.io/arch = [amd64|arm64|...]

If a Pod specification does not specify a nodeSelector like "kubernetes.io/os": windows, it is possible the Pod can be scheduled on any host, Windows or Linux. This can be problematic since a Windows container can only run on Windows and a Linux container can only run on Linux. The best practice is to use a nodeSelector.

However, we understand that in many cases users have a pre-existing large number of deployments for Linux containers, as well as an ecosystem of off-the-shelf configurations, such as community Helm charts, and programmatic Pod generation cases, such as with Operators. In those situations, you may be hesitant to make the configuration change to add nodeSelectors. The alternative is to use Taints. Because the kubelet can set Taints during registration, it could easily be modified to automatically add a taint when running on Windows only.

For example: --register-with-taints='os=windows:NoSchedule'

By adding a taint to all Windows nodes, nothing will be scheduled on them (that includes existing Linux Pods). In order for a Windows Pod to be scheduled on a Windows node, it would need both the nodeSelector and the appropriate matching toleration to choose Windows.

nodeSelector:
    kubernetes.io/os: windows
    node.kubernetes.io/windows-build: '10.0.17763'
tolerations:
    - key: "os"
      operator: "Equal"
      value: "windows"
      effect: "NoSchedule"

Handling multiple Windows versions in the same cluster

The Windows Server version used by each pod must match that of the node. If you want to use multiple Windows Server versions in the same cluster, then you should set additional node labels and nodeSelectors.

Kubernetes 1.17 automatically adds a new label node.kubernetes.io/windows-build to simplify this. If you're running an older version, then it's recommended to add this label manually to Windows nodes.

This label reflects the Windows major, minor, and build number that need to match for compatibility. Here are values used today for each Windows Server version.

Product Name Build Number(s)
Windows Server 2019 10.0.17763
Windows Server version 1809 10.0.17763
Windows Server version 1903 10.0.18362

Simplifying with RuntimeClass

RuntimeClass can be used to simplify the process of using taints and tolerations. A cluster administrator can create a RuntimeClass object which is used to encapsulate these taints and tolerations.

  1. Save this file to runtimeClasses.yml. It includes the appropriate nodeSelector for the Windows OS, architecture, and version.
apiVersion: node.k8s.io/v1
kind: RuntimeClass
metadata:
  name: windows-2019
handler: 'docker'
scheduling:
  nodeSelector:
    kubernetes.io/os: 'windows'
    kubernetes.io/arch: 'amd64'
    node.kubernetes.io/windows-build: '10.0.17763'
  tolerations:
  - effect: NoSchedule
    key: os
    operator: Equal
    value: "windows"
  1. Run kubectl create -f runtimeClasses.yml using as a cluster administrator
  2. Add runtimeClassName: windows-2019 as appropriate to Pod specs

For example:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: iis-2019
  labels:
    app: iis-2019
spec:
  replicas: 1
  template:
    metadata:
      name: iis-2019
      labels:
        app: iis-2019
    spec:
      runtimeClassName: windows-2019
      containers:
      - name: iis
        image: mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore/iis:windowsservercore-ltsc2019
        resources:
          limits:
            cpu: 1
            memory: 800Mi
          requests:
            cpu: .1
            memory: 300Mi
        ports:
          - containerPort: 80
 selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: iis-2019
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: iis
spec:
  type: LoadBalancer
  ports:
  - protocol: TCP
    port: 80
  selector:
    app: iis-2019