Getting started

• 1: Learning environment
• 2: Production environment
• 2.1: Container Runtimes
• 2.2: Installing Kubernetes with deployment tools
• 2.2.1: Bootstrapping clusters with kubeadm
• 2.2.1.1: Installing kubeadm
• 2.2.1.2: Troubleshooting kubeadm
• 2.2.1.3: Creating a cluster with kubeadm
• 2.2.1.4: Customizing components with the kubeadm API
• 2.2.1.5: Options for Highly Available Topology
• 2.2.1.6: Creating Highly Available Clusters with kubeadm
• 2.2.1.7: Set up a High Availability etcd Cluster with kubeadm
• 2.2.1.8: Configuring each kubelet in your cluster using kubeadm
• 2.2.1.9: Dual-stack support with kubeadm
• 2.3: Turnkey Cloud Solutions
• 3: Best practices
• 3.1: Considerations for large clusters
• 3.2: Running in multiple zones
• 3.3: Validate node setup
• 3.4: Enforcing Pod Security Standards
• 3.5: PKI certificates and requirements

1 - Learning environment

2 - Production environment

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.
• 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:
  • Add secrets that a pod could use to pull images from a particular container registry. See Configure Service Accounts for Pods for an example.
  • Assign RBAC permissions to a service account. See ServiceAccount permissions for details.

What's next

• Decide if you want to build your own production Kubernetes or obtain one from available Turnkey Cloud Solutions or Kubernetes Partners.
• If you choose to build your own cluster, plan how you want to handle certificates and set up high availability for features such as etcd and the API server.
• Choose from kubeadm, kops or Kubespray deployment methods.
• Configure user management by determining your Authentication and Authorization methods.
• Prepare for application workloads by setting up resource limits, DNS autoscaling and service accounts.

2.1 - 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 1.29 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.

• containerd
• CRI-O
• Docker Engine
• Mirantis Container Runtime

Install and configure prerequisites

The following steps apply common settings for Kubernetes nodes on Linux.

You can skip a particular setting if you're certain you don't need it.

For more information, see Network Plugin Requirements or the documentation for your specific container runtime.

Forwarding IPv4 and letting iptables see bridged traffic

Execute the below mentioned instructions:

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

sudo modprobe overlay
sudo modprobe br_netfilter

# sysctl params required by setup, params persist across reboots
cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/k8s.conf
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables  = 1
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 1
net.ipv4.ip_forward                 = 1
EOF

# Apply sysctl params without reboot
sudo sysctl --system

Verify that the br_netfilter, overlay modules are loaded by running the following commands:

lsmod | grep br_netfilter
lsmod | grep overlay

Verify that the net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables, net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables, and net.ipv4.ip_forward system variables are set to 1 in your sysctl config by running the following command:

sysctl net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables net.ipv4.ip_forward

cgroup drivers

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

Both the kubelet and the underlying container runtime need to interface with control groups to enforce resource management for pods and containers and set resources such as cpu/memory requests and limits. To interface with control groups, the kubelet and the container runtime need to use a cgroup driver. It's critical that the kubelet and the container runtime use the same cgroup driver and are configured the same.

There are two cgroup drivers available:

• cgroupfs
• systemd

cgroupfs driver

The cgroupfs driver is the default cgroup driver in the kubelet. When the cgroupfs driver is used, the kubelet and the container runtime directly interface with the cgroup filesystem to configure cgroups.

The cgroupfs driver is not recommended when systemd is the init system because systemd expects a single cgroup manager on the system. Additionally, if you use cgroup v2, use the systemd cgroup driver instead of cgroupfs.

systemd cgroup driver

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. As a result, if you use systemd as the init system with the cgroupfs driver, the system gets two different cgroup managers.

Two cgroup managers result in two views of the available and in-use resources in the system. In some cases, nodes that are configured to use cgroupfs for the kubelet and container runtime, but use systemd for the rest of the processes become unstable under resource pressure.

The approach to mitigate this instability is to use systemd as the cgroup driver for the kubelet and the container runtime when systemd is the selected init system.

To set systemd as the cgroup driver, edit the KubeletConfiguration option of cgroupDriver and set it to systemd. For example:

apiVersion: kubelet.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: KubeletConfiguration
...
cgroupDriver: systemd

In Kubernetes v1.28, with the KubeletCgroupDriverFromCRI feature gate enabled and a container runtime that supports the RuntimeConfig CRI RPC, the kubelet automatically detects the appropriate cgroup driver from the runtime, and ignores the cgroupDriver setting within the kubelet configuration.

If you configure systemd as the cgroup driver for the kubelet, you must also configure systemd as the cgroup driver for the container runtime. Refer to the documentation for your container runtime for instructions. For example:

• containerd
• CRI-O

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 starting v1.26 only works with v1 of the CRI API. Earlier versions default to v1 version, however 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.

To install containerd on your system, follow the instructions on getting started with containerd. Return to this step once you've created a valid config.toml configuration file.

• Linux
• Windows

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

The systemd cgroup driver is recommended if you use cgroup v2.

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

sudo systemctl restart containerd

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

In Kubernetes v1.28, you can enable automatic detection of the cgroup driver as an alpha feature. See systemd cgroup driver for more details.

Overriding the sandbox (pause) image

In your containerd config you can overwrite the sandbox image by setting the following config:

[plugins."io.containerd.grpc.v1.cri"]
  sandbox_image = "registry.k8s.io/pause:3.2"

You might need to restart containerd as well once you've updated the config file: systemctl restart containerd.

Please note, that it is a best practice for kubelet to declare the matching pod-infra-container-image. If not configured, kubelet may attempt to garbage collect the pause image. There is ongoing work in containerd to pin the pause image and not require this setting on kubelet any longer.

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.

In Kubernetes v1.28, you can enable automatic detection of the cgroup driver as an alpha feature. See systemd cgroup driver for more details.

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

Overriding the sandbox (pause) image

In your CRI-O config you can set the following config value:

[crio.image]
pause_image="registry.k8s.io/pause:3.6"

This config option supports live configuration reload to apply this change: systemctl reload crio or by sending SIGHUP to the crio process.

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.

Overriding the sandbox (pause) image

The cri-dockerd adapter accepts a command line argument for specifying which container image to use as the Pod infrastructure container (“pause image”). The command line argument to use is --pod-infra-container-image.

What's next

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

2.2 - Installing Kubernetes with deployment tools

There are many methods and tools for setting up your own production Kubernetes cluster. For example:

• kubeadm

• kops: An automated cluster provisioning tool. For tutorials, best practices, configuration options and information on reaching out to the community, please check the kOps website for details.

• kubespray: A composition of Ansible playbooks, inventory, provisioning tools, and domain knowledge for generic OS/Kubernetes clusters configuration management tasks. You can reach out to the community on Slack channel #kubespray.

2.2.1 - Bootstrapping clusters with kubeadm

2.2.1.1 - 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 Creating a cluster with kubeadm 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 configuration. The default behavior of a kubelet was to fail to start if swap memory was detected on a node. Swap has been supported since v1.22. And since v1.28, Swap is supported for cgroup v2 only; the NodeSwap feature gate of the kubelet is beta but disabled by default.
  • You MUST disable swap if the kubelet is not properly configured to use swap. For example, sudo swapoff -a will disable swapping temporarily. To make this change persistent across reboots, make sure swap is disabled in config files like /etc/fstab, systemd.swap, depending how it was configured on your system.

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.

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:

• Linux
• Windows

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:

• Kubernetes version and version-skew policy
• Kubeadm-specific version skew policy

• Debian-based distributions
• Red Hat-based distributions
• Without a package manager

CNI_PLUGINS_VERSION="v1.3.0"
ARCH="amd64"
DEST="/opt/cni/bin"
sudo mkdir -p "$DEST"
curl -L "https://github.com/containernetworking/plugins/releases/download/${CNI_PLUGINS_VERSION}/cni-plugins-linux-${ARCH}-${CNI_PLUGINS_VERSION}.tgz" | sudo tar -C "$DEST" -xz

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

CRICTL_VERSION="v1.28.0"
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

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

RELEASE_VERSION="v0.16.2"
curl -sSL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/release/${RELEASE_VERSION}/cmd/krel/templates/latest/kubelet/kubelet.service" | sed "s:/usr/bin:${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/${RELEASE_VERSION}/cmd/krel/templates/latest/kubeadm/10-kubeadm.conf" | sed "s:/usr/bin:${DOWNLOAD_DIR}:g" | sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/kubelet.service.d/10-kubeadm.conf

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

• Using kubeadm to Create a Cluster

2.2.1.2 - 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:

  • Go to github.com/kubernetes/kubeadm and search for existing issues.
  • If no issue exists, please open one and follow the issue template.

• 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:

• Upgrade to a newer version of Docker.

• Disable SELinux.

• Modify the coredns deployment to set allowPrivilegeEscalation to true:

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/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.

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.

Upgrade fails due to etcd hash not changing

Only applicable to upgrading a control plane node with a kubeadm binary v1.28.3 or later, where the node is currently managed by kubeadm versions v1.28.0, v1.28.1 or v1.28.2.

Here is the error message you may encounter:

[upgrade/etcd] Failed to upgrade etcd: couldn't upgrade control plane. kubeadm has tried to recover everything into the earlier state. Errors faced: static Pod hash for component etcd on Node kinder-upgrade-control-plane-1 did not change after 5m0s: timed out waiting for the condition
[upgrade/etcd] Waiting for previous etcd to become available
I0907 10:10:09.109104    3704 etcd.go:588] [etcd] attempting to see if all cluster endpoints ([https://172.17.0.6:2379/ https://172.17.0.4:2379/ https://172.17.0.3:2379/]) are available 1/10
[upgrade/etcd] Etcd was rolled back and is now available
static Pod hash for component etcd on Node kinder-upgrade-control-plane-1 did not change after 5m0s: timed out waiting for the condition
couldn't upgrade control plane. kubeadm has tried to recover everything into the earlier state. Errors faced
k8s.io/kubernetes/cmd/kubeadm/app/phases/upgrade.rollbackOldManifests
	cmd/kubeadm/app/phases/upgrade/staticpods.go:525
k8s.io/kubernetes/cmd/kubeadm/app/phases/upgrade.upgradeComponent
	cmd/kubeadm/app/phases/upgrade/staticpods.go:254
k8s.io/kubernetes/cmd/kubeadm/app/phases/upgrade.performEtcdStaticPodUpgrade
	cmd/kubeadm/app/phases/upgrade/staticpods.go:338
...

The reason for this failure is that the affected versions generate an etcd manifest file with unwanted defaults in the PodSpec. This will result in a diff from the manifest comparison, and kubeadm will expect a change in the Pod hash, but the kubelet will never update the hash.

There are two way to workaround this issue if you see it in your cluster:

• The etcd upgrade can be skipped between the affected versions and v1.28.3 (or later) by using:

  kubeadm upgrade {apply|node} [version] --etcd-upgrade=false
  

  This is not recommended in case a new etcd version was introduced by a later v1.28 patch version.

• Before upgrade, patch the manifest for the etcd static pod, to remove the problematic defaulted attributes:

  diff --git a/etc/kubernetes/manifests/etcd_defaults.yaml b/etc/kubernetes/manifests/etcd_origin.yaml
  index d807ccbe0aa..46b35f00e15 100644
  --- a/etc/kubernetes/manifests/etcd_defaults.yaml
  +++ b/etc/kubernetes/manifests/etcd_origin.yaml
  @@ -43,7 +43,6 @@ spec:
          scheme: HTTP
        initialDelaySeconds: 10
        periodSeconds: 10
  -      successThreshold: 1
        timeoutSeconds: 15
      name: etcd
      resources:
  @@ -59,26 +58,18 @@ spec:
          scheme: HTTP
        initialDelaySeconds: 10
        periodSeconds: 10
  -      successThreshold: 1
        timeoutSeconds: 15
  -    terminationMessagePath: /dev/termination-log
  -    terminationMessagePolicy: File
      volumeMounts:
      - mountPath: /var/lib/etcd
        name: etcd-data
      - mountPath: /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd
        name: etcd-certs
  -  dnsPolicy: ClusterFirst
  -  enableServiceLinks: true
    hostNetwork: true
    priority: 2000001000
    priorityClassName: system-node-critical
  -  restartPolicy: Always
  -  schedulerName: default-scheduler
    securityContext:
      seccompProfile:
        type: RuntimeDefault
  -  terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 30
    volumes:
    - hostPath:
        path: /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd
  

More information can be found in the tracking issue for this bug.

2.2.1.3 - 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 v1.29.

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

Component installation

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

Network setup

kubeadm similarly to other Kubernetes components tries to find a usable IP on the network interfaces associated with a default gateway on a host. Such an IP is then used for the advertising and/or listening performed by a component.

To find out what this IP is on a Linux host you can use:

ip route show # Look for a line starting with "default via"

Kubernetes components do not accept custom network interface as an option, therefore a custom IP address must be passed as a flag to all components instances that need such a custom configuration.

To configure the API server advertise address for control plane nodes created with both init and join, the flag --apiserver-advertise-address can be used. Preferably, this option can be set in the kubeadm API as InitConfiguration.localAPIEndpoint and JoinConfiguration.controlPlane.localAPIEndpoint.

For kubelets on all nodes, the --node-ip option can be passed in .nodeRegistration.kubeletExtraArgs inside a kubeadm configuration file (InitConfiguration or JoinConfiguration).

For dual-stack see Dual-stack support with kubeadm.

The IP addresses that you assign to control plane components become part of their X.509 certificates' subject alternative name fields. Changing these IP addresses would require signing new certificates and restarting the affected components, so that the change in certificate files is reflected. See Manual certificate renewal for more details on this topic.

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 registry.k8s.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.

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-

The output will look something like:

node "test-01" untainted
...

This will remove the node-role.kubernetes.io/control-plane:NoSchedule taint from any nodes that have it, 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

• Verify that your cluster is running properly with Sonobuoy
• See Upgrading kubeadm clusters for details about upgrading your cluster using kubeadm.
• Learn about advanced kubeadm usage in the kubeadm reference documentation
• Learn more about Kubernetes concepts and kubectl.
• See the Cluster Networking page for a bigger list of Pod network add-ons.
• See the list of add-ons to explore other add-ons, including tools for logging, monitoring, network policy, visualization & control of your Kubernetes cluster.
• Configure how your cluster handles logs for cluster events and from applications running in Pods. See Logging Architecture for an overview of what is involved.

Feedback

• For bugs, visit the kubeadm GitHub issue tracker
• For support, visit the #kubeadm Slack channel
• General SIG Cluster Lifecycle development Slack channel: #sig-cluster-lifecycle
• SIG Cluster Lifecycle SIG information
• SIG Cluster Lifecycle mailing list: kubernetes-sig-cluster-lifecycle

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 1.29
• kubernetesVersion must be at 1.29 or 1.28

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 1.29
• kubelet on the host must be at 1.29, 1.28, 1.27 or 1.26

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 1.29 was used to create a cluster with kubeadm init
• Joining nodes must use a kubeadm binary that is at version 1.29

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 1.28 was used to create or upgrade the node
• The version of kubeadm used for upgrading the node must be at 1.28 or 1.29

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:

• Regularly back up etcd. The etcd data directory configured by kubeadm is at /var/lib/etcd on the control-plane node.

• Use multiple control-plane nodes. You can read Options for Highly Available topology to pick a cluster topology that provides high-availability.

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.

2.2.1.4 - 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 with patches

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 component configuration is 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, etcd and kubeletconfiguration.
• 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 and kubeadm will apply the same base KubeletConfiguration to all nodes in the cluster.

For applying instance-specific configuration over the base KubeletConfiguration you can use the kubeletconfiguration patch target.

Alternatively, you can use kubelet flags as overrides by passing them in the nodeRegistration.kubeletExtraArgs field supported by both InitConfiguration and JoinConfiguration. Some kubelet flags are deprecated, so check their status in the kubelet reference documentation before using them.

For additional 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.

2.2.1.5 - 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.

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.

What's next

• Set up a highly available cluster with kubeadm

2.2.1.6 - 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:

• Stacked etcd
• External etcd

Container images

Each host should have access read and fetch images from the Kubernetes container image registry, registry.k8s.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.

   Note: The kubeadm init flags --config and --certificate-key cannot be mixed, therefore if you want to use the kubeadm configuration you must add the certificateKey field in the appropriate config locations (under InitConfiguration and JoinConfiguration: controlPlane).
   Note: Some CNI network plugins require additional configuration, for example specifying the pod IP CIDR, while others do not. See the CNI network documentation. To add a pod CIDR pass the flag --pod-network-cidr, or if you are using a kubeadm configuration file set the podSubnet field under the networking object of ClusterConfiguration.

   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
     

   The certificate key is a hex encoded string that is an AES key of size 32 bytes.

   Note: The kubeadm-certs Secret and the decryption key expire after two hours.
   Caution: As stated in the command output, the certificate key gives access to cluster sensitive data, keep it secret!

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).

   Note: You must pick a network plugin that suits your use case and deploy it before you move on to next step. If you don't do this, you will not be able to launch your cluster properly.

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. Set up 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
   

   Note: The difference between stacked etcd and external etcd here is that the external etcd setup requires a configuration file with the etcd endpoints under the external object for etcd. In the case of the stacked etcd topology, this is managed automatically.

   • 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.

   Note: You must pick a network plugin that suits your use case and deploy it before you move on to next step. If you don't do this, you will not be able to launch your cluster properly.

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
   

   Caution: Copy only the certificates in the above list. kubeadm will take care of generating the rest of the certificates with the required SANs for the joining control-plane instances. If you copy all the certificates by mistake, the creation of additional nodes could fail due to a lack of required SANs.

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
   

2.2.1.7 - 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 (registry.k8s.io) or list/pull the required etcd image using kubeadm config images list/pull. This guide will set up 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.

   Note: You must do this on every host where etcd should be running.
   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/kubelet.conf
   # Replace "systemd" with the cgroup driver of your container runtime. The default value in the kubelet is "cgroupfs".
   # Replace the value of "containerRuntimeEndpoint" for a different container runtime if needed.
   #
   apiVersion: kubelet.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
   kind: KubeletConfiguration
   authentication:
     anonymous:
       enabled: false
     webhook:
       enabled: false
   authorization:
     mode: AlwaysAllow
   cgroupDriver: systemd
   address: 127.0.0.1
   containerRuntimeEndpoint: unix:///var/run/containerd/containerd.sock
   staticPodPath: /etc/kubernetes/manifests
   EOF
   
   cat << EOF > /etc/systemd/system/kubelet.service.d/20-etcd-service-manager.conf
   [Service]
   ExecStart=
   ExecStart=/usr/bin/kubelet --config=/etc/systemd/system/kubelet.service.d/kubelet.conf
   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.

   If etcdctl isn't available, you can run this tool inside a container image. You would do that directly with your container runtime using a tool such as crictl run and not through Kubernetes

   ETCDCTL_API=3 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
   ...
   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 ${HOST0}to the IP address of the host you are testing.

What's next

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

2.2.1.8 - Configuring each kubelet in your cluster using kubeadm

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.

The recommended way of applying such instance-specific configuration is by using KubeletConfiguration patches.

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.

It is also possible to apply instance-specific patches over the base KubeletConfiguration. Have a look at Customizing the kubelet for more details.

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 package is written to /etc/systemd/system/kubelet.service.d/10-kubeadm.conf and is used by systemd. It augments the basic kubelet.service:

[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:

2.2.1.9 - Dual-stack support with kubeadm

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

• Validate IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack networking
• Read about Dual-stack cluster networking
• Learn more about the kubeadm configuration format

2.3 - 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.

3 - Best practices

3.1 - Considerations for large clusters

A cluster is a set of nodes (physical or virtual machines) running Kubernetes agents, managed by the control plane. Kubernetes v1.29 supports clusters with up to 5,000 nodes. More specifically, Kubernetes is designed to accommodate configurations that meet all of the following criteria:

• No more than 110 pods per node
• No more than 5,000 nodes
• No more than 150,000 total pods
• No more than 300,000 total containers

You can scale your cluster by adding or removing nodes. The way you do this depends on how your cluster is deployed.

Cloud provider resource quotas

To avoid running into cloud provider quota issues, when creating a cluster with many nodes, consider:

• Requesting a quota increase for cloud resources such as:
  • Computer instances
  • CPUs
  • Storage volumes
  • In-use IP addresses
  • Packet filtering rule sets
  • Number of load balancers
  • Network subnets
  • Log streams
• Gating the cluster scaling actions to bring up new nodes in batches, with a pause between batches, because some cloud providers rate limit the creation of new instances.

Control plane components

For a large cluster, you need a control plane with sufficient compute and other resources.

Typically you would run one or two control plane instances per failure zone, scaling those instances vertically first and then scaling horizontally after reaching the point of falling returns to (vertical) scale.

You should run at least one instance per failure zone to provide fault-tolerance. Kubernetes nodes do not automatically steer traffic towards control-plane endpoints that are in the same failure zone; however, your cloud provider might have its own mechanisms to do this.

For example, using a managed load balancer, you configure the load balancer to send traffic that originates from the kubelet and Pods in failure zone A, and direct that traffic only to the control plane hosts that are also in zone A. If a single control-plane host or endpoint failure zone A goes offline, that means that all the control-plane traffic for nodes in zone A is now being sent between zones. Running multiple control plane hosts in each zone makes that outcome less likely.

etcd storage

To improve performance of large clusters, you can store Event objects in a separate dedicated etcd instance.

When creating a cluster, you can (using custom tooling):

• start and configure additional etcd instance
• configure the API server to use it for storing events

See Operating etcd clusters for Kubernetes and Set up a High Availability etcd cluster with kubeadm for details on configuring and managing etcd for a large cluster.

Addon resources

Kubernetes resource limits help to minimize the impact of memory leaks and other ways that pods and containers can impact on other components. These resource limits apply to addon resources just as they apply to application workloads.

For example, you can set CPU and memory limits for a logging component:

  ...
  containers:
  - name: fluentd-cloud-logging
    image: fluent/fluentd-kubernetes-daemonset:v1
    resources:
      limits:
        cpu: 100m
        memory: 200Mi

Addons' default limits are typically based on data collected from experience running each addon on small or medium Kubernetes clusters. When running on large clusters, addons often consume more of some resources than their default limits. If a large cluster is deployed without adjusting these values, the addon(s) may continuously get killed because they keep hitting the memory limit. Alternatively, the addon may run but with poor performance due to CPU time slice restrictions.

To avoid running into cluster addon resource issues, when creating a cluster with many nodes, consider the following:

• Some addons scale vertically - there is one replica of the addon for the cluster or serving a whole failure zone. For these addons, increase requests and limits as you scale out your cluster.
• Many addons scale horizontally - you add capacity by running more pods - but with a very large cluster you may also need to raise CPU or memory limits slightly. The VerticalPodAutoscaler can run in recommender mode to provide suggested figures for requests and limits.
• Some addons run as one copy per node, controlled by a DaemonSet: for example, a node-level log aggregator. Similar to the case with horizontally-scaled addons, you may also need to raise CPU or memory limits slightly.

What's next

• VerticalPodAutoscaler is a custom resource that you can deploy into your cluster to help you manage resource requests and limits for pods.
  Learn more about Vertical Pod Autoscaler and how you can use it to scale cluster components, including cluster-critical addons.

• The cluster autoscaler integrates with a number of cloud providers to help you run the right number of nodes for the level of resource demand in your cluster.

• The addon resizer helps you in resizing the addons automatically as your cluster's scale changes.

3.2 - Running in multiple zones

This page describes running Kubernetes across multiple zones.

Background

Kubernetes is designed so that a single Kubernetes cluster can run across multiple failure zones, typically where these zones fit within a logical grouping called a region. Major cloud providers define a region as a set of failure zones (also called availability zones) that provide a consistent set of features: within a region, each zone offers the same APIs and services.

Typical cloud architectures aim to minimize the chance that a failure in one zone also impairs services in another zone.

Control plane behavior

All control plane components support running as a pool of interchangeable resources, replicated per component.

When you deploy a cluster control plane, place replicas of control plane components across multiple failure zones. If availability is an important concern, select at least three failure zones and replicate each individual control plane component (API server, scheduler, etcd, cluster controller manager) across at least three failure zones. If you are running a cloud controller manager then you should also replicate this across all the failure zones you selected.

Node behavior

Kubernetes automatically spreads the Pods for workload resources (such as Deployment or StatefulSet) across different nodes in a cluster. This spreading helps reduce the impact of failures.

When nodes start up, the kubelet on each node automatically adds labels to the Node object that represents that specific kubelet in the Kubernetes API. These labels can include zone information.

If your cluster spans multiple zones or regions, you can use node labels in conjunction with Pod topology spread constraints to control how Pods are spread across your cluster among fault domains: regions, zones, and even specific nodes. These hints enable the scheduler to place Pods for better expected availability, reducing the risk that a correlated failure affects your whole workload.

For example, you can set a constraint to make sure that the 3 replicas of a StatefulSet are all running in different zones to each other, whenever that is feasible. You can define this declaratively without explicitly defining which availability zones are in use for each workload.

Distributing nodes across zones

Kubernetes' core does not create nodes for you; you need to do that yourself, or use a tool such as the Cluster API to manage nodes on your behalf.

Using tools such as the Cluster API you can define sets of machines to run as worker nodes for your cluster across multiple failure domains, and rules to automatically heal the cluster in case of whole-zone service disruption.

Manual zone assignment for Pods

You can apply node selector constraints to Pods that you create, as well as to Pod templates in workload resources such as Deployment, StatefulSet, or Job.

Storage access for zones

When persistent volumes are created, the PersistentVolumeLabel admission controller automatically adds zone labels to any PersistentVolumes that are linked to a specific zone. The scheduler then ensures, through its NoVolumeZoneConflict predicate, that pods which claim a given PersistentVolume are only placed into the same zone as that volume.

You can specify a StorageClass for PersistentVolumeClaims that specifies the failure domains (zones) that the storage in that class may use. To learn about configuring a StorageClass that is aware of failure domains or zones, see Allowed topologies.

Networking

By itself, Kubernetes does not include zone-aware networking. You can use a network plugin to configure cluster networking, and that network solution might have zone-specific elements. For example, if your cloud provider supports Services with type=LoadBalancer, the load balancer might only send traffic to Pods running in the same zone as the load balancer element processing a given connection. Check your cloud provider's documentation for details.

For custom or on-premises deployments, similar considerations apply. Service and Ingress behavior, including handling of different failure zones, does vary depending on exactly how your cluster is set up.

Fault recovery

When you set up your cluster, you might also need to consider whether and how your setup can restore service if all the failure zones in a region go off-line at the same time. For example, do you rely on there being at least one node able to run Pods in a zone?
Make sure that any cluster-critical repair work does not rely on there being at least one healthy node in your cluster. For example: if all nodes are unhealthy, you might need to run a repair Job with a special toleration so that the repair can complete enough to bring at least one node into service.

Kubernetes doesn't come with an answer for this challenge; however, it's something to consider.

What's next

To learn how the scheduler places Pods in a cluster, honoring the configured constraints, visit Scheduling and Eviction.

3.3 - Validate node setup

Node Conformance Test

Node conformance test is a containerized test framework that provides a system verification and functionality test for a node. The test validates whether the node meets the minimum requirements for Kubernetes; a node that passes the test is qualified to join a Kubernetes cluster.

Node Prerequisite

To run node conformance test, a node must satisfy the same prerequisites as a standard Kubernetes node. At a minimum, the node should have the following daemons installed:

• CRI-compatible container runtimes such as Docker, Containerd and CRI-O
• Kubelet

Running Node Conformance Test

To run the node conformance test, perform the following steps:

1. Work out the value of the --kubeconfig option for the kubelet; for example: --kubeconfig=/var/lib/kubelet/config.yaml. Because the test framework starts a local control plane to test the kubelet, use http://localhost:8080 as the URL of the API server. There are some other kubelet command line parameters you may want to use:

• --cloud-provider: If you are using --cloud-provider=gce, you should remove the flag to run the test.

2. Run the node conformance test with command:

# $CONFIG_DIR is the pod manifest path of your Kubelet.
# $LOG_DIR is the test output path.
sudo docker run -it --rm --privileged --net=host \
  -v /:/rootfs -v $CONFIG_DIR:$CONFIG_DIR -v $LOG_DIR:/var/result \
  registry.k8s.io/node-test:0.2

Running Node Conformance Test for Other Architectures

Kubernetes also provides node conformance test docker images for other architectures:

Running Selected Test

To run specific tests, overwrite the environment variable FOCUS with the regular expression of tests you want to run.

sudo docker run -it --rm --privileged --net=host \
  -v /:/rootfs:ro -v $CONFIG_DIR:$CONFIG_DIR -v $LOG_DIR:/var/result \
  -e FOCUS=MirrorPod \ # Only run MirrorPod test
  registry.k8s.io/node-test:0.2

To skip specific tests, overwrite the environment variable SKIP with the regular expression of tests you want to skip.

sudo docker run -it --rm --privileged --net=host \
  -v /:/rootfs:ro -v $CONFIG_DIR:$CONFIG_DIR -v $LOG_DIR:/var/result \
  -e SKIP=MirrorPod \ # Run all conformance tests but skip MirrorPod test
  registry.k8s.io/node-test:0.2

Node conformance test is a containerized version of node e2e test. By default, it runs all conformance tests.

Theoretically, you can run any node e2e test if you configure the container and mount required volumes properly. But it is strongly recommended to only run conformance test, because it requires much more complex configuration to run non-conformance test.

Caveats

• The test leaves some docker images on the node, including the node conformance test image and images of containers used in the functionality test.
• The test leaves dead containers on the node. These containers are created during the functionality test.

3.4 - Enforcing Pod Security Standards

This page provides an overview of best practices when it comes to enforcing Pod Security Standards.

Using the built-in Pod Security Admission Controller

The Pod Security Admission Controller intends to replace the deprecated PodSecurityPolicies.

Configure all cluster namespaces

Namespaces that lack any configuration at all should be considered significant gaps in your cluster security model. We recommend taking the time to analyze the types of workloads occurring in each namespace, and by referencing the Pod Security Standards, decide on an appropriate level for each of them. Unlabeled namespaces should only indicate that they've yet to be evaluated.

In the scenario that all workloads in all namespaces have the same security requirements, we provide an example that illustrates how the PodSecurity labels can be applied in bulk.

Embrace the principle of least privilege

In an ideal world, every pod in every namespace would meet the requirements of the restricted policy. However, this is not possible nor practical, as some workloads will require elevated privileges for legitimate reasons.

• Namespaces allowing privileged workloads should establish and enforce appropriate access controls.
• For workloads running in those permissive namespaces, maintain documentation about their unique security requirements. If at all possible, consider how those requirements could be further constrained.

Adopt a multi-mode strategy

The audit and warn modes of the Pod Security Standards admission controller make it easy to collect important security insights about your pods without breaking existing workloads.

It is good practice to enable these modes for all namespaces, setting them to the desired level and version you would eventually like to enforce. The warnings and audit annotations generated in this phase can guide you toward that state. If you expect workload authors to make changes to fit within the desired level, enable the warn mode. If you expect to use audit logs to monitor/drive changes to fit within the desired level, enable the audit mode.

When you have the enforce mode set to your desired value, these modes can still be useful in a few different ways:

• By setting warn to the same level as enforce, clients will receive warnings when attempting to create Pods (or resources that have Pod templates) that do not pass validation. This will help them update those resources to become compliant.
• In Namespaces that pin enforce to a specific non-latest version, setting the audit and warn modes to the same level as enforce, but to the latest version, gives visibility into settings that were allowed by previous versions but are not allowed per current best practices.

Third-party alternatives

Other alternatives for enforcing security profiles are being developed in the Kubernetes ecosystem:

• Kubewarden.
• Kyverno.
• OPA Gatekeeper.

The decision to go with a built-in solution (e.g. PodSecurity admission controller) versus a third-party tool is entirely dependent on your own situation. When evaluating any solution, trust of your supply chain is crucial. Ultimately, using any of the aforementioned approaches will be better than doing nothing.

3.5 - PKI certificates and requirements

Kubernetes requires PKI certificates for authentication over TLS. If you install Kubernetes with kubeadm, the certificates that your cluster requires are automatically generated. You can also generate your own certificates -- for example, to keep your private keys more secure by not storing them on the API server. This page explains the certificates that your cluster requires.

How certificates are used by your cluster

Kubernetes requires PKI for the following operations:

• Client certificates for the kubelet to authenticate to the API server
• Kubelet server certificates for the API server to talk to the kubelets
• Server certificate for the API server endpoint
• Client certificates for administrators of the cluster to authenticate to the API server
• Client certificates for the API server to talk to the kubelets
• Client certificate for the API server to talk to etcd
• Client certificate/kubeconfig for the controller manager to talk to the API server
• Client certificate/kubeconfig for the scheduler to talk to the API server.
• Client and server certificates for the front-proxy

etcd also implements mutual TLS to authenticate clients and peers.

Where certificates are stored

If you install Kubernetes with kubeadm, most certificates are stored in /etc/kubernetes/pki. All paths in this documentation are relative to that directory, with the exception of user account certificates which kubeadm places in /etc/kubernetes.

Configure certificates manually

If you don't want kubeadm to generate the required certificates, you can create them using a single root CA or by providing all certificates. See Certificates for details on creating your own certificate authority. See Certificate Management with kubeadm for more on managing certificates.

Single root CA

You can create a single root CA, controlled by an administrator. This root CA can then create multiple intermediate CAs, and delegate all further creation to Kubernetes itself.

Required CAs:

On top of the above CAs, it is also necessary to get a public/private key pair for service account management, sa.key and sa.pub. The following example illustrates the CA key and certificate files shown in the previous table:

/etc/kubernetes/pki/ca.crt
/etc/kubernetes/pki/ca.key
/etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.crt
/etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.key
/etc/kubernetes/pki/front-proxy-ca.crt
/etc/kubernetes/pki/front-proxy-ca.key

All certificates

If you don't wish to copy the CA private keys to your cluster, you can generate all certificates yourself.

Required certificates:

[1]: any other IP or DNS name you contact your cluster on (as used by kubeadm the load balancer stable IP and/or DNS name, kubernetes, kubernetes.default, kubernetes.default.svc, kubernetes.default.svc.cluster, kubernetes.default.svc.cluster.local)

where kind maps to one or more of the x509 key usage, which is also documented in the .spec.usages of a CertificateSigningRequest type:

Certificate paths

Certificates should be placed in a recommended path (as used by kubeadm). Paths should be specified using the given argument regardless of location.

Same considerations apply for the service account key pair:

The following example illustrates the file paths from the previous tables you need to provide if you are generating all of your own keys and certificates:

/etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.key
/etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.crt
/etc/kubernetes/pki/apiserver-etcd-client.key
/etc/kubernetes/pki/apiserver-etcd-client.crt
/etc/kubernetes/pki/ca.key
/etc/kubernetes/pki/ca.crt
/etc/kubernetes/pki/apiserver.key
/etc/kubernetes/pki/apiserver.crt
/etc/kubernetes/pki/apiserver-kubelet-client.key
/etc/kubernetes/pki/apiserver-kubelet-client.crt
/etc/kubernetes/pki/front-proxy-ca.key
/etc/kubernetes/pki/front-proxy-ca.crt
/etc/kubernetes/pki/front-proxy-client.key
/etc/kubernetes/pki/front-proxy-client.crt
/etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/server.key
/etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/server.crt
/etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/peer.key
/etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/peer.crt
/etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/healthcheck-client.key
/etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/healthcheck-client.crt
/etc/kubernetes/pki/sa.key
/etc/kubernetes/pki/sa.pub

Configure certificates for user accounts

You must manually configure these administrator account and service accounts:

1. For each config, generate an x509 cert/key pair with the given CN and O.

2. Run kubectl as follows for each config:

KUBECONFIG=<filename> kubectl config set-cluster default-cluster --server=https://<host ip>:6443 --certificate-authority <path-to-kubernetes-ca> --embed-certs
KUBECONFIG=<filename> kubectl config set-credentials <credential-name> --client-key <path-to-key>.pem --client-certificate <path-to-cert>.pem --embed-certs
KUBECONFIG=<filename> kubectl config set-context default-system --cluster default-cluster --user <credential-name>
KUBECONFIG=<filename> kubectl config use-context default-system

These files are used as follows:

The following files illustrate full paths to the files listed in the previous table:

/etc/kubernetes/admin.conf
/etc/kubernetes/super-admin.conf
/etc/kubernetes/kubelet.conf
/etc/kubernetes/controller-manager.conf
/etc/kubernetes/scheduler.conf