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Currently playing with kubernetes, I need to deploy a cluster by myself on my own hardware or cloud provider (I would love to use GCE but it is not possible in a near future).

I saw kubeadm allow a quick and easy cluster bootstrapping except it does only provide one kubernetes master.

As I'm looking for a solution I can use in production:

  • What would happen if the master reboot for an unknown reason ?
  • Using kubeadm, is it possible to enable cloud provider features such as LB or persistent volumes plugins ?
Alex Grs
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I am also trying to bring up some experimental setups using ubu 16.04 and kubeadm, with the following experience:

the master reboot situation is the most critical point with kubeadm, as the cluster is not booting up properly after a reboot. Another SO user reported the issue here, where I shared my scripts to relaunch the cluster if the weave net is stuck in CrashLoopBackOff.

I also let it alone for a while, and after a lot of restarts it started to work...but this means a quite long down time to your cluster.

When wiping the cluster, you loose all your configuration. The only way to prevent this is to restore etcd somehow...however I didn't find any acceptable solution, yet.

About cloud providers, there are experimental ones since 1.4.3 AFAIK. I didn't try it, but it is a way to go. However, if you are planning more generic, bare metal for example, you should take a look at part 3 of this article series about deploying kube on scaleway with kubeadm, which covers installing glusterfs as PV. In Part 2 he also describes using traefik as ingress controller.

As you see, operating a production cluster with kubeadm is not a easy task, but as they say, it's still alpha. I am watching this project excited, hoping it gets production ready, soon.

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David Steiman
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  • Thank you for the answer. Rightnow I think that running your own kubernetes cluster when you a re a small team is quite complex ! – Alex Grs Nov 04 '16 at 08:32
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    [Here](https://kubernetes.io/docs/admin/kubeadm/) is the reference flag to setup --cloud-provider using kubeadm. – Carlos Mar 09 '17 at 18:33
  • we've been using kubeadm v1.6.1 with no issues in production for over 4 months... we have a single master with 5 nodes. – Jeryl Cook Jan 18 '18 at 22:38