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Creating infrastructure nodes

This process is not applicable for clusters with manually provisioned machines. You can use the advanced machine management and scaling capabilities only in clusters where the Machine API is operational.

You can use infrastructure machine sets to create machines that host only infrastructure components, such as the default router, the integrated container image registry, and the components for cluster metrics and monitoring. These infrastructure machines are not counted toward the total number of subscriptions that are required to run the environment.

In a production deployment, it is recommended that you deploy at least three machine sets to hold infrastructure components. Both OpenShift Logging and Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh deploy Elasticsearch, which requires three instances to be installed on different nodes. Each of these nodes can be deployed to different availability zones for high availability. This configuration requires three different machine sets, one for each availability zone. In global Azure regions that do not have multiple availability zones, you can use availability sets to ensure high availability.

OKD infrastructure components

The following infrastructure workloads do not incur OKD worker subscriptions:

  • Kubernetes and OKD control plane services that run on masters

  • The default router

  • The integrated container image registry

  • The HAProxy-based Ingress Controller

  • The cluster metrics collection, or monitoring service, including components for monitoring user-defined projects

  • Cluster aggregated logging

  • Service brokers

  • Red Hat Quay

  • Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage

  • Red Hat Advanced Cluster Manager

  • Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes

  • Red Hat OpenShift GitOps

  • Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines

Any node that runs any other container, pod, or component is a worker node that your subscription must cover.

For information about infrastructure nodes and which components can run on infrastructure nodes, see the "Red Hat OpenShift control plane and infrastructure nodes" section in the OpenShift sizing and subscription guide for enterprise Kubernetes document.

To create an infrastructure node, you can use a machine set, label the node, or use a machine config pool.

Creating an infrastructure node

See Creating infrastructure machine sets for installer-provisioned infrastructure environments or for any cluster where the control plane nodes (also known as the master nodes) are managed by the machine API.

Requirements of the cluster dictate that infrastructure, also called infra nodes, be provisioned. The installer only provides provisions for control plane and worker nodes. Worker nodes can be designated as infrastructure nodes or application, also called app, nodes through labeling.

Procedure

  1. Add a label to the worker node that you want to act as application node:

    $ oc label node <node-name> node-role.kubernetes.io/app=""

  2. Add a label to the worker nodes that you want to act as infrastructure nodes:

    $ oc label node <node-name> node-role.kubernetes.io/infra=""

  3. Check to see if applicable nodes now have the infra role and app roles:

    $ oc get nodes

  4. Create a default cluster-wide node selector. The default node selector is applied to pods created in all namespaces. This creates an intersection with any existing node selectors on a pod, which additionally constrains the pod’s selector.

    If the default node selector key conflicts with the key of a pod’s label, then the default node selector is not applied.

    However, do not set a default node selector that might cause a pod to become unschedulable. For example, setting the default node selector to a specific node role, such as node-role.kubernetes.io/infra="", when a pod’s label is set to a different node role, such as node-role.kubernetes.io/master="", can cause the pod to become unschedulable. For this reason, use caution when setting the default node selector to specific node roles.

    You can alternatively use a project node selector to avoid cluster-wide node selector key conflicts.

    1. Edit the Scheduler object:

      $ oc edit scheduler cluster

    2. Add the defaultNodeSelector field with the appropriate node selector:

      apiVersion: config.openshift.io/v1
kind: Scheduler
metadata:
  name: cluster
...
spec:
  defaultNodeSelector: topology.kubernetes.io/region=us-east-1 (1)
...
      1 This example node selector deploys pods on nodes in the us-east-1 region by default.

    3. Save the file to apply the changes.

You can now move infrastructure resources to the newly labeled infra nodes.

Additional resources