Pre-provisioned Cluster Creation Customization Choices

Below are a some methods to customize your cluster during creation. If none of these choices apply, skip this page and proceed to either section:

Section Topics

When creating clusters, many options are available such as those listed in this section of the documentation. A brief explanation of each choice is given in the following topic summaries with a link to the more descriptive page for that topic. To use these, proceed to the cluster choice page for detailed instructions:

Pre-provisioned Customizing CAPI Clusters — Familiarize yourself with Cluster API before editing the cluster objects because edits can prevent the cluster from deploying successfully.

Pre-provisioned Registry Mirrors — In an air-gapped environment, you need a local repository to store Helm charts, Docker images, and other artifacts. In an environment with access to the Internet, you can retrieve artifacts from specialized repositories dedicated to them, such as Docker images contained in DockerHub and Helm Charts that come from a dedicated Helm Chart repository.

Pre-provisioned Create Secrets and Overrides — Create necessary secrets and overrides for pre-provisioned clusters. Most applications deployed through Kubernetes require access to databases, services, and other resources located externally. The easiest way to manage the login information necessary to access those resources is using secrets in order to help organize and distribute sensitive information across a cluster while minimizing the risk of sensitive information exposure.

Pre-provisioned Define Control Plane Endpoint — A control plane should have three, five, or seven nodes, so it can remain available if one, two, or three nodes fail. A control plane with one node should not be used in production.

Pre-provisioned Configure MetalLB — It is recommended that an external load balancer(LB) be the control plane endpoint. To distribute request load among the control plane machines, configure the load balancer to send requests to all the control plane machines. Configure the load balancer to send requests only to control plane machines that are responding to API requests. If you do not have one, you can use Metal LB to create a MetalLB configmap for your Pre-provisioned infrastructure.

Pre-provisioned Modify the Calico Installation — Calico is a networking and security solution that enables Kubernetes workloads and non-Kubernetes/legacy workloads to communicate seamlessly and securely. Sometimes changes are needed, so use the information in this Pre-provisioned Modify the Calico Installation page.

Pre-provisioned Built-in Virtual IP — As explained in Define the Control Plane Endpoint, we recommend using an external load balancer for the control plane endpoint, but provide a built-in virtual IP when an external load balancer is not available. If an external load balancer is not available, use the built-in virtual IP.

Pre-provisioned Use HTTP Proxy — When you require HTTP proxy configurations, you can apply them during the create operation by adding the appropriate flags to the dkp create cluster command.

Pre-provisioned Use Alternate Pod or Service Subnets — Some subnets are reserved by Kubernetes and can prevent proper cluster deployment if you unknowingly configure DKP so that the Node subnet collides with either the Pod or Service subnet.

Pre-provisioned Output Directory YAML — You can create individual files with different smaller manifests for ease in editing using the --output-directory flag used with --output=json|yaml. You create the directory of where to output resources to files.

Single-Node control plane

Do not use a single-node control plane in a production cluster.

A control plane with one node can use its single node as the endpoint, so you will not require an external load balancer, or a built-in virtual IP. At least one control plane node must always be running. Therefore, to upgrade a cluster with one control plane node, a spare machine must be available in the control plane inventory. This machine is used to provision the new node before the old node is deleted.

Modify Control Plane Audit logs settings using the information contained in the page Configuring the Control Plane.

When the API server endpoints are defined, you can create the cluster.

Next Step

If none of the customizations above applies, continue to installation instructions for your environment: