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 necessary safety updates and patches and ought to be accomplished recurrently. For extra data on forms of employee node upgrades, see Updating VPC employee nodes and Updating Traditional employee 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 necessary to ensure your cluster has sufficient capability to proceed operating your workload all through the improve course of. Constructing a pipeline to replace your employee nodes with out inflicting utility downtime will assist you to simply apply employee node upgrades recurrently.

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 Traditional employee nodes within the CLI with a configmap within the Kubernetes service documentation. In the event you select to not create a configmap, the default most quantity of employee nodes that turn out to be unavailable is 20%.

In the event you want your whole variety of employee nodes to stay up and operating, use the ibmcloud ks worker-pool resize command to quickly add additional employee nodes to your cluster in the course 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 previous 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 similar time, however should you improve a number of without delay, they turn out to be unavailable on the similar time. To be sure to have sufficient capability to run your workload through the improve, you possibly can plan to both resize your employee swimming pools to quickly add additional employee nodes (much 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 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.

Study extra about IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service clusters