This document is aimed at helping Cluster Admins when configuring High Availability (HA) support for the Tekton Pipeline Controller and Webhook components. HA support allows components to remain operational when a disruption occurs, such as nodes being drained for upgrades.
For the Controller, HA is achieved by following an active/active model, where all replicas of the Controller can receive and process work items. In this HA approach the workqueue is distributed across buckets, where each replica owns a subset of those buckets and can process the load if the given replica is the leader of that bucket.
By default, only one Controller replica is configured, to reduce resource usage. This effectively disables HA for the Controller by default.
In order to achieve HA for the Controller, the number of replicas for the Controller should be greater than one. This allows other instances to take over in case of any disruption on the current active controller.
You can modify the replicas number in the Controller deployment under spec.replicas
, or apply an update to a running deployment:
kubectl -n tekton-pipelines scale deployment tekton-pipelines-controller --replicas=3
Leader election can be configured in config-leader-election.yaml. The ConfigMap defines the following parameters:
Parameter | Default |
---|---|
data.buckets |
1 |
data.leaseDuration |
15s |
data.renewDeadline |
10s |
data.retryPeriod |
2s |
Note: The maximum value of data.buckets
at this time is 10.
If HA is not required, you can disable it by scaling the deployment back to one replica. You can also modify the controller deployment, by specifying in the tekton-pipelines-controller
container the disable-ha
flag. For example:
spec:
serviceAccountName: tekton-pipelines-controller
containers:
- name: tekton-pipelines-controller
# ...
args: [
# Other flags defined here...
"-disable-ha=true",
]
Note: If you set -disable-ha=false
and run multiple replicas of the Controller, each replica will process work items separately, which will lead to unwanted behavior when creating resources (e.g., TaskRuns
, etc.).
In general, setting -disable-ha=false
is not recommended. Instead, to disable HA, simply run one replica of the Controller deployment.
The Webhook deployment is stateless, which means it can more easily be configured for HA, and even autoscale replicas in response to load.
By default, only one Webhook replica is configured, to reduce resource usage. This effectively disables HA for the Webhook by default.
In order to achieve HA for the Webhook deployment, you can modify the replicas
number in the Webhook deployment under spec.replicas
, or apply an update to a running deployment:
kubectl -n tekton-pipelines scale deployment tekton-pipelines-webhook --replicas=3
You can also modify the HorizontalPodAutoscaler to set a minimum number of replicas:
apiVersion: autoscaling/v2
kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
metadata:
name: tekton-pipelines-webhook
# ...
spec:
minReplicas: 1
By default, the Webhook deployment is not configured to block a Cluster Autoscaler from scaling down the node that's running the only replica of the deployment using the cluster-autoscaler.kubernetes.io/safe-to-evict
annotation.
This means that during node drains, the Webhook might be unavailable temporarily, during which time Tekton resources can't be created, updated or deleted.
To avoid this, you can add the safe-to-evict
annotation set to false
to block node drains during autoscaling, or, better yet, configure multiple replicas of the Webhook deployment.
To avoid the Webhook Service becoming unavailable during node unavailability (e.g., during node upgrades), you can ensure that a minimum number of Webhook replicas are available at time by defining a PodDisruptionBudget
which sets a minAvailable
greater than zero:
apiVersion: policy/v1beta1
kind: PodDisruptionBudget
metadata:
name: tekton-pipelines-webhook
namespace: tekton-pipelines
labels:
app.kubernetes.io/name: webhook
app.kubernetes.io/component: webhook
app.kubernetes.io/instance: default
app.kubernetes.io/part-of: tekton-pipelines
# ...
spec:
minAvailable: 1
selector:
matchLabels:
app.kubernetes.io/name: webhook
app.kubernetes.io/component: webhook
app.kubernetes.io/instance: default
app.kubernetes.io/part-of: tekton-pipelines
Webhook replicas are configured to avoid being scheduled onto the same node by default, so that a single node disruption doesn't make all Webhook replicas unavailable.