Set up a High Availability etcd cluster with kubeadm

Note: While kubeadm is being used as the management tool for external etcd nodes in this guide, please note that kubeadm does not plan to support certificate rotation or upgrades for such nodes. The long term plan is to empower the tool etcdadm to manage these aspects.

Kubeadm defaults to running a single member etcd cluster in a static pod managed by the kubelet on the control plane node. This is not a high availability setup as the etcd cluster contains only one member and cannot sustain any members becoming unavailable. This task walks through the process of creating a high availability etcd cluster of three members that can be used as an external etcd when using kubeadm to set up a kubernetes cluster.

Before you begin

• Three hosts that can talk to each other over ports 2379 and 2380. This document assumes these default ports. However, they are configurable through the kubeadm config file.
• Each host must have docker, kubelet, and kubeadm installed.
• Each host should have access to the Kubernetes container image registry (k8s.gcr.io) or list/pull the required etcd image using kubeadm config images list/pull. This guide will setup etcd instances as static pods managed by a kubelet.
• Some infrastructure to copy files between hosts. For example ssh and scp can satisfy this requirement.

Setting up the cluster

The general approach is to generate all certs on one node and only distribute the necessary files to the other nodes.

Note: kubeadm contains all the necessary crytographic machinery to generate the certificates described below; no other cryptographic tooling is required for this example.

1. Configure the kubelet to be a service manager for etcd.

   Note: You must do this on every host where etcd should be running.

   Since etcd was created first, you must override the service priority by creating a new unit file that has higher precedence than the kubeadm-provided kubelet unit file.

   cat << EOF > /etc/systemd/system/kubelet.service.d/20-etcd-service-manager.conf
   [Service]
   ExecStart=
   #  Replace "systemd" with the cgroup driver of your container runtime. The default value in the kubelet is "cgroupfs".
   ExecStart=/usr/bin/kubelet --address=127.0.0.1 --pod-manifest-path=/etc/kubernetes/manifests --cgroup-driver=systemd
   Restart=always
   EOF
   
   systemctl daemon-reload
   systemctl restart kubelet
   

   Check the kubelet status to ensure it is running.

   systemctl status kubelet
   

2. Create configuration files for kubeadm.

   Generate one kubeadm configuration file for each host that will have an etcd member running on it using the following script.

   # Update HOST0, HOST1, and HOST2 with the IPs or resolvable names of your hosts
   export HOST0=10.0.0.6
   export HOST1=10.0.0.7
   export HOST2=10.0.0.8
   
   # Create temp directories to store files that will end up on other hosts.
   mkdir -p /tmp/${HOST0}/ /tmp/${HOST1}/ /tmp/${HOST2}/
   
   ETCDHOSTS=(${HOST0} ${HOST1} ${HOST2})
   NAMES=("infra0" "infra1" "infra2")
   
   for i in "${!ETCDHOSTS[@]}"; do
   HOST=${ETCDHOSTS[$i]}
   NAME=${NAMES[$i]}
   cat << EOF > /tmp/${HOST}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
   apiVersion: "kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta3"
   kind: ClusterConfiguration
   etcd:
       local:
           serverCertSANs:
           - "${HOST}"
           peerCertSANs:
           - "${HOST}"
           extraArgs:
               initial-cluster: ${NAMES[0]}=https://${ETCDHOSTS[0]}:2380,${NAMES[1]}=https://${ETCDHOSTS[1]}:2380,${NAMES[2]}=https://${ETCDHOSTS[2]}:2380
               initial-cluster-state: new
               name: ${NAME}
               listen-peer-urls: https://${HOST}:2380
               listen-client-urls: https://${HOST}:2379
               advertise-client-urls: https://${HOST}:2379
               initial-advertise-peer-urls: https://${HOST}:2380
   EOF
   done
   

3. Generate the certificate authority

   If you already have a CA then the only action that is copying the CA's crt and key file to /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.crt and /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.key. After those files have been copied, proceed to the next step, "Create certificates for each member".

   If you do not already have a CA then run this command on $HOST0 (where you generated the configuration files for kubeadm).

   kubeadm init phase certs etcd-ca
   

   This creates two files

   • /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.crt
   • /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.key

4. Create certificates for each member

   kubeadm init phase certs etcd-server --config=/tmp/${HOST2}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
   kubeadm init phase certs etcd-peer --config=/tmp/${HOST2}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
   kubeadm init phase certs etcd-healthcheck-client --config=/tmp/${HOST2}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
   kubeadm init phase certs apiserver-etcd-client --config=/tmp/${HOST2}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
   cp -R /etc/kubernetes/pki /tmp/${HOST2}/
   # cleanup non-reusable certificates
   find /etc/kubernetes/pki -not -name ca.crt -not -name ca.key -type f -delete
   
   kubeadm init phase certs etcd-server --config=/tmp/${HOST1}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
   kubeadm init phase certs etcd-peer --config=/tmp/${HOST1}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
   kubeadm init phase certs etcd-healthcheck-client --config=/tmp/${HOST1}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
   kubeadm init phase certs apiserver-etcd-client --config=/tmp/${HOST1}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
   cp -R /etc/kubernetes/pki /tmp/${HOST1}/
   find /etc/kubernetes/pki -not -name ca.crt -not -name ca.key -type f -delete
   
   kubeadm init phase certs etcd-server --config=/tmp/${HOST0}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
   kubeadm init phase certs etcd-peer --config=/tmp/${HOST0}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
   kubeadm init phase certs etcd-healthcheck-client --config=/tmp/${HOST0}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
   kubeadm init phase certs apiserver-etcd-client --config=/tmp/${HOST0}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
   # No need to move the certs because they are for HOST0
   
   # clean up certs that should not be copied off this host
   find /tmp/${HOST2} -name ca.key -type f -delete
   find /tmp/${HOST1} -name ca.key -type f -delete
   

5. Copy certificates and kubeadm configs

   The certificates have been generated and now they must be moved to their respective hosts.

   USER=ubuntu
   HOST=${HOST1}
   scp -r /tmp/${HOST}/* ${USER}@${HOST}:
   ssh ${USER}@${HOST}
   USER@HOST $ sudo -Es
   root@HOST $ chown -R root:root pki
   root@HOST $ mv pki /etc/kubernetes/
   

6. Ensure all expected files exist

   The complete list of required files on $HOST0 is:

   /tmp/${HOST0}
   └── kubeadmcfg.yaml
   ---
   /etc/kubernetes/pki
   ├── apiserver-etcd-client.crt
   ├── apiserver-etcd-client.key
   └── etcd
       ├── ca.crt
       ├── ca.key
       ├── healthcheck-client.crt
       ├── healthcheck-client.key
       ├── peer.crt
       ├── peer.key
       ├── server.crt
       └── server.key
   

   On $HOST1:

   $HOME
   └── kubeadmcfg.yaml
   ---
   /etc/kubernetes/pki
   ├── apiserver-etcd-client.crt
   ├── apiserver-etcd-client.key
   └── etcd
       ├── ca.crt
       ├── healthcheck-client.crt
       ├── healthcheck-client.key
       ├── peer.crt
       ├── peer.key
       ├── server.crt
       └── server.key
   

   On $HOST2

   $HOME
   └── kubeadmcfg.yaml
   ---
   /etc/kubernetes/pki
   ├── apiserver-etcd-client.crt
   ├── apiserver-etcd-client.key
   └── etcd
       ├── ca.crt
       ├── healthcheck-client.crt
       ├── healthcheck-client.key
       ├── peer.crt
       ├── peer.key
       ├── server.crt
       └── server.key
   

7. Create the static pod manifests

   Now that the certificates and configs are in place it's time to create the manifests. On each host run the kubeadm command to generate a static manifest for etcd.

   root@HOST0 $ kubeadm init phase etcd local --config=/tmp/${HOST0}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
   root@HOST1 $ kubeadm init phase etcd local --config=/tmp/${HOST1}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
   root@HOST2 $ kubeadm init phase etcd local --config=/tmp/${HOST2}/kubeadmcfg.yaml
   

8. Optional: Check the cluster health

   docker run --rm -it \
   --net host \
   -v /etc/kubernetes:/etc/kubernetes k8s.gcr.io/etcd:${ETCD_TAG} etcdctl \
   --cert /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/peer.crt \
   --key /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/peer.key \
   --cacert /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.crt \
   --endpoints https://${HOST0}:2379 endpoint health --cluster
   ...
   https://[HOST0 IP]:2379 is healthy: successfully committed proposal: took = 16.283339ms
   https://[HOST1 IP]:2379 is healthy: successfully committed proposal: took = 19.44402ms
   https://[HOST2 IP]:2379 is healthy: successfully committed proposal: took = 35.926451ms
   

   • Set ${ETCD_TAG} to the version tag of your etcd image. For example 3.4.3-0. To see the etcd image and tag that kubeadm uses execute kubeadm config images list --kubernetes-version ${K8S_VERSION}, where ${K8S_VERSION} is for example v1.17.0
   • Set ${HOST0}to the IP address of the host you are testing.

What's next

Once you have a working 3 member etcd cluster, you can continue setting up a highly available control plane using the external etcd method with kubeadm.