Shoots configure a maintenance time window in which Gardener performs certain operations that may restart the control plane, roll out the nodes, result in higher network traffic, etc. This document outlines what happens during a shoot maintenance.
Via the .spec.maintenance.timeWindow
field in the shoot specification end-users can configure the time window in which maintenance operations are executed.
Gardener runs one maintenance operation per day in this time window:
spec:
maintenance:
timeWindow:
begin: 220000+0100
end: 230000+0100
The offset (+0100
) is considered with respect to UTC time.
The minimum time window is 30m
and the maximum is 6h
.
Internally, Gardener is subtracting 15m
from the end of the time window to (best-effort) try to finish the maintenance until the end is reached, however, it might not work in all cases.
If you don't specify a time window then Gardener will randomly compute it. You can change it later, of course.
The .spec.maintenance.autoUpdate
field in the shoot specification allows you to control how/whether automatic updates of Kubernetes patch and machine image versions are performed.
Machine image versions are updated per worker pool.
spec:
maintenance:
autoUpdate:
kubernetesVersion: true
machineImageVersion: true
During the daily maintenance, the Gardener Controller Manager updates the Shoot's Kubernetes and machine image version if any of the following criteria applies:
- there is a higher version available and the Shoot opted-in for automatic version updates
- the currently used version is
expired
Gardener creates events with type MaintenanceDone
on the Shoot describing the action performed during maintenance including the reason why an update has been triggered.
MaintenanceDone Updated image of worker-pool 'coreos-xy' from 'coreos' version 'xy' to version 'abc'. Reason: AutoUpdate of MachineImage configured.
MaintenanceDone Updated Kubernetes version '0.0.1' to version '0.0.5'. This is an increase in the patch level. Reason: AutoUpdate of Kubernetes version configured.
MaintenanceDone Updated Kubernetes version '0.0.5' to version '0.1.5'. This is an increase in the minor level. Reason: Kubernetes version expired - force update required.
Please refer to this document for more information about Kubernetes and machine image versions in Gardener.
Gardener administrators/operators can configure the Gardenlet in a way that it only reconciles shoot clusters during their maintenance time windows. This behaviour is not controllable by end-users but might make sense for large Gardener installations. Concretely, your shoot will be reconciled regularly during its maintenance time window. Outside of the maintenance time window it will only reconcile if you change the specification or if you explicitly trigger it, see also this document.
Via the .spec.maintenance.confineSpecUpdateRollout
field you can control whether you want to make Gardener roll out changes/updates to your shoot specification only during the maintenance time window.
It is false
by default, i.e., any change to your shoot specification triggers a reconciliation (even outside of the maintenance time window).
This is helpful if you want to update your shoot but don't want the changes to be applied immediately. One example use-case would be a Kubernetes version upgrade that you want to roll out during the maintenance time window.
Any update to the specification will not increase the .metadata.generation
of the Shoot
which is something you should be aware of.
Also, even if Gardener administrators/operators have not enabled the "reconciliation in maintenance time window only" configuration (as mentioned above) then your shoot will only reconcile in the maintenance time window.
The reason is that Gardener cannot differentiate between create/update/reconcile operations.
confineSpecUpdateRollout=true
, please note that if you change the maintenance time window itself then it will only be effective after the upcoming maintenance.
.spec.hibernation.enabled
field.
If you hibernate or wake-up your shoot then Gardener gets active right away.
The shoot maintenance controller triggers special operations that are performed as part of the shoot reconciliation.
The reconciliation of the Infrastructure
and DNSRecord
extension resources is only demanded during the shoot's maintenance time window.
The rationale behind it is to prevent sending too many requests against the cloud provider APIs, especially on large landscapes or if a user has many shoot clusters in the same cloud provider account.
Gardener operators can make Gardener restart/delete certain control plane pods during a shoot maintenance. This feature helps to automatically solve service denials of controllers due to stale caches, dead-locks or starving routines.
Please note that these are exceptional cases but they are observed from time to time.
Gardener, for example, takes this precautionary measure for kube-controller-manager
pods.
See this document to see how extension developers can extend this behaviour.
Gardener operators can make Gardener restart some core addons, at the moment only CoreDNS, during a shoot maintenance.
CoreDNS benefits from this feature as it automatically solve problems with clients stuck to single replica of the deployment and thus overloading it. Please note that these are exceptional cases but they are observed from time to time.