Managing your cloud ecosystems: Maintaining workload continuity during worker node upgrades

Planning and managing your cloud ecosystem and environments is crucial for decreasing manufacturing downtime and sustaining a functioning workload. Within the “Managing your cloud ecosystems” weblog sequence, we cowl completely different methods for guaranteeing that your setup features easily with minimal downtime.

To begin issues off, the primary matter on this weblog sequence is guaranteeing workload continuity throughout employee node upgrades.

What are employee node upgrades?

Employee node upgrades apply vital safety updates and patches and ought to be accomplished usually. For extra info on kinds of employee node upgrades, see Updating VPC worker nodes and Updating Classic worker nodes within the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service documentation.

Throughout an improve, a few of your employee nodes could turn out to be unavailable. It’s vital to verify your cluster has sufficient capability to proceed working your workload all through the improve course of. Constructing a pipeline to replace your employee nodes with out inflicting software downtime will can help you simply apply employee node upgrades usually.

For traditional employee nodes

Create a Kubernetes configmap that defines the utmost variety of employee nodes that may be unavailable at a time, together with throughout an improve. The utmost worth is specified as a proportion. You can even use labels to use completely different guidelines to completely different employee nodes. For full directions, see Updating Classic worker nodes in the CLI with a configmap within the Kubernetes service documentation. Should you select to not create a configmap, the default most quantity of employee nodes that turn out to be unavailable is 20%.

Should you want your complete variety of employee nodes to stay up and working, use the ibmcloud ks worker-pool resize command to quickly add additional employee nodes to your cluster at some point of the improve course of. When the improve is full, use the identical command to take away the extra employee nodes and return your employee pool to its earlier dimension.

For VPC employee nodes

VPC employee nodes are changed by eradicating the outdated employee node and provisioning a brand new employee node that runs on the new model. You possibly can improve a number of employee nodes on the identical time, however in case you improve a number of directly, they turn out to be unavailable on the identical time. To be sure you have sufficient capability to run your workload through the improve, you’ll be able to plan to both resize your worker pools to quickly add additional employee nodes (just like the method described for traditional employee nodes) or plan to improve your employee nodes one after the other.

Wrap up

Whether or not you select to implement a configmap, resize your employee pool or improve parts one-by-one, making a workload continuity plan earlier than you improve your employee nodes will help you create a extra streamlined, environment friendly setup with restricted downtime.

Now that you’ve got a plan to stop disruptions throughout employee node upgrades, preserve an eye fixed out for the subsequent weblog in our sequence, which can talk about how, when and why to implement main, minor or patch upgrades to your clusters and employee nodes.

Learn more about IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service clusters