The Nectar Container Orchestration Engine (COE) service provides support for provisioning Kubernetes clusters as a service on the Nectar Research Cloud using OpenStack Magnum. This allows a user to spin up a container cluster (Kubernetes) on Nectar Research Cloud.

Learn more here.

Updates

18-08-2022 Magnum Yoga

Magnum has been upgraded to Yoga. This fixes several stability issues in Magnum. A list of changes is below:

  • Supports Kubernetes v1.23.8 with Fedora CoreOS 35
  • Defaults to containerd instead of docker. In preparation for the removal of dockershim in Kubernetes v1.24, the default kubernetes-*-1.23.8 templates now runs with containerd by default. See this blog post by Kubernetes for more information. We have decided to default to containerd so users can be more prepared for the v1.24
  • If you are planning to move to Kubernetes v1.23 from v1.17.11 or v1.21.1 templates, please note that several deprecated APIs have been removed in v1.22. You should check your manifests for usage of deprecated API before moving to v1.23.
  • Update versions of several Kubernetes / OpenStack plugins with the v1.23.8 templates
  • For the updated plugins, please follow the respective links for Changelogs. These updates fixes bugs and improves the stability between Kubernetes and OpenStack. For the CSI plugins (attacher/provisioner/etc), the respective versions can be seen in Cluster Template labels.
  • As upstream is dropping support for Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, we will also be limiting our support to only Kubernetes. We strongly encourage users to use Kubernetes; if you require assistance please feel free to reach out with a ticket, and we will be glad to support you on your Kubernetes journey.

Known Issues

Flannel not working

With the kubernetes-*-v1.21 cluster templates, flannel has a bug where it will not work properly on first boot, or on host reboot. You will need to kill the flannel pods if this happens.

kubectl -n kube-system delete pod -l app=flannel

This is a bug in systemd and Fedora CoreOS 32. The fix is to use kubernetes-*-1.23 cluster templates, which uses Fedora CoreOS 35.