High availability best practices

Building reliable and highly available distributed systems is a non-trivial endeavor. In this section, we will check some of the best practices that enable a Kubernetes-based system to function reliably and be available in the face of various failure categories. We will also dive deep and see how to go about constructing your own highly available clusters.

Note that you should roll your own highly available Kubernetes cluster only in very special cases. Tools such as Kubespray provide battle-tested ways to create highly available clusters. You should take advantage of all the work and effort that went into these tools.

Creating highly available clusters

To create a highly available Kubernetes cluster, the master components must be redundant. That means etcd must be deployed as a cluster (typically across three or five nodes) and the Kubernetes API server must be redundant. Auxiliary cluster-management services such as Heapster storage...