Demystifying Kubernetes cluster maintenance
Before April 2021, Kubernetes had maintained quite a steady and sound cadence of quarterly releases throughout the year. Despite the strong growth and incredible popularity in the community, this was reduced to three releases per year. Fewer releases still mean that a regular maintenance window should be scheduled within the organization for the upgrade of security patches, and to take full advantage of enhancements and new features.
A general maintenance window contains the upgraded Kubernetes cluster version. We can easily break the task to be performed into two parts:
- Upgrading the master node, which contains the control plane
- Upgrading the worker node
Upgrading the master node is simple if you have only one master node. However, most enterprise-grade customers may have a couple of master nodes for better resilience. We should be aware that working with an organization as a Kubernetes administrator is sometimes...
