Architecture

Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform (KKP) makes full use of Kubernetes cluster to organize and scale workloads, depending on your and your customer’s needs. In a typical small-scale setup, pictured below, a single cluster contains KKP and the master components for every user cluster.

KKP Architecture Diagram

Master Cluster

The Master Cluster is a Kubernetes cluster which is responsible for storing the information about users, projects and SSH keys. It hosts the KKP components and might also act as a seed cluster.

The KKP components are the

  • Dashboard
  • KKP API
  • KKP Controller Manager

Seed Cluster

The Seed Cluster is a Kubernetes cluster which is responsible for hosting the master components of a user cluster.

The seed cluster uses namespaces of Kubernetes to logically separate resources from each other. KKP will install the master components of a Kubernetes cluster within each namespace, plus a light monitoring stack consisting of Prometheus and an OpenVPN server to allow secure communication between the master components in the seed cluster and the pod/service network of the worker nodes.

User Cluster

The User Cluster is a Kubernetes cluster created and managed by KKP.

Datacenters

KKP has the concept of Datacenters, for example “AWS US-East”, “DigitalOcean Frankfurt” or a local vSphere deployment. Datacenters are used to specify where user clusters can be created in, so you can choose to only support running user clusters on AWS.

Large-Scale Deployments

Instead of running the KKP master and seed components in a single cluster, it is advisable for large-scale deployments to have multiple, dedicated seed clusters, as pictured below.

KKP Architecture Diagram

This setup is useful for keeping the latency between the master components of a user cluster and the worker nodes as small as possible, improving the Kubernetes performance for customers. In this setup, the supported datacenters are assigned to a single seed, for example

  • Seed seed-us on GKE in us-east1 supports creating clusters in
    • AWS us-east-2 and us-west-1
    • Google Cloud us-east1 and us-west1
    • DigitalOcean New York 1
  • Seed seed-eu on Amazon EC2 in eu-west-1 supports creating clusters in
    • AWS eu-central-1 and eu-west-1
    • DigitalOcean ams1 and lon1

See the installation documentation for more details on how to setup datacenters.