Scaling the Control Plane

Intro

As the load on the control plane depends on the size of the cluster, it might be necessary to scale up the control plane during runtime.

Defaults

All control planes, managed by Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform (KKP), have the following defaults:

apiserver:
  replicas: 1
  resources:
    limits:
      cpu: 500m
      memory: 1Gi
    requests:
      cpu: 100m
      memory: 256Mi
controllerManager:
  replicas: 1
  resources:
    limits:
      cpu: 250m
      memory: 512Mi
    requests:
      cpu: 100m
      memory: 100Mi
scheduler:
  replicas: 1
  resources:
    limits:
      cpu: 100m
      memory: 128Mi
    requests:
      cpu: 20m
      memory: 64Mi
etcd:
  # replicas cannot be configured - the etcd always runs with 3 members
  resources:
    limits:
     cpu: 100m
     memory: 1Gi
  requests:
    cpu: 50m
    memory: 256Mi

Setting Custom Overrides

Custom settings can be applid by modifying the clusters cluster.spec.componentsOverride property:

apiVersion: kubermatic.k8s.io/v1
kind: Cluster
metadata:
  name: rwhxp9j5j
spec:
  componentsOverride:
    apiserver:
      replicas: 3
      resources:
        limits:
          cpu: 2
          memory: 2Gi
        requests:
          cpu: 500m
          memory: 1Gi
    controllerManager: {}
    etcd: {}
    scheduler: {}

The above override will override the default settings for the API Server, but won’t affect the other components.

To note here is that, specifying the resources override of a component will override all default resources. For example:

apiVersion: kubermatic.k8s.io/v1
kind: Cluster
metadata:
  name: rwhxp9j5j
spec:
  componentsOverride:
    apiserver:
      replicas: 3
      resources: {}
    controllerManager: {}
    etcd: {}
    scheduler: {}

The above setting cluster.spec.componentsOverride.apiserver.resources: {} will lead to no resource limits/requests set on the API Server. It is not possible therefore to only override a single resource setting.