Managed System Add-Ons - Rafay Product Documentation

Overview

Managed System Add-ons can be added to a cluster blueprint and be deployed on clusters. Once enabled in a blueprint, the required k8s software components and configuration are automatically deployed to the target clusters. Support and technical assistance is provided for the Managed Add-ons and Services.

Managed System Addons Components Supported Distros
Managed Storage Rook-Ceph Upstream k8s
Managed Storage GlusterFS (Deprecated) Upstream k8s
Ingress Controller Ingress Nginx All
Monitoring & Alerting Prometheus All
Monitoring & Alerting Metrics Server All
Monitoring & Alerting Alert Manager All
Secrets Store CSI Driver Secret Store CSI driver + AWS Secrets Manager provider specific plugins Amazon EKS
Node Termination Handler AWS Node Termination Handler (Deprecated) Amazon EKS

Managed Services

Managed Services are turnkey, high value integrations that can be based on either open source or purpose built software. Once enabled, the required k8s software components and configuration are automatically deployed to the target clusters. Support and technical assistance is provided for Managed Services.

Managed Services Components Supported Distros
Monitoring & Alerting Prometheus All
Monitoring & Alerting Metrics Server All
Policy Management OPA Gatekeeper All
Backup & Restore Velero All
Network Policy Cilium All

Mandatory Addons

The k8s Management Operator is selected by default and users are not allowed to disable this add-on. This is required for centralized management of Kubernetes clusters.


Optional Addons

Managed Storage

Managed Storage enables the Ceph/Rook storage addon, which can be deployed to your cluster(s) during provision to avail distributed storage systems.

Ingress Controller

Ingress controller, selected by default in the Controller, is a specialized load balancer for Kubernetes (and other containerized) environments. This specific add-on accepts traffic from outside the Kubernetes platform and load balance it to pods (containers) running inside the platform.

Monitoring & Alerting

Monitoring & Alerting, selected by default, collects the various metrics from different system services and generates alerts. This specific add-on helps to record real-time metrics in a time series database, with real-time alerting. Users are allowed to customize the Monitoring & Alerting add-on.

Customize Prometheus Add-On

Enabling Monitoring & Alerting Add-ons helps to update the controller dashboards of various metrics associated with clusters.

Kube State Metrics, Node Exporter, and Helm Exporter plays a major role in exposing the metrics in the controller dashboard. Invalid data might break the dashboard.

Prometheus Adapter: Prometheus Adapter is used for HPA (Horizontal Pod Autoscaler). Enabling this metric to use for automatically scaling workload up or down based on resource usage.

Metrics Server: Metrics Server provides metrics for resource utilization like CPU & Memory.

GPU Operator: To install the GPU Operator and have the dashboards work, users must specify the resource type as either Service or Pod, and add the required key-value labels.

Click Save to apply all the changes made to the Monitoring & Alerting add-ons.

Secrets Store CSI Driver

During the pod start/restart, Secrets Store CSI Driver communicates with the provider using gRPC to retrieve the secret content from the external Secrets Store specified in the SecretProviderClass custom resource.

Node Termination Handler (Amazon EKS only)

The AWS Node Termination Handler handles EC2 interruption events such as Spot interruptions, scheduled maintenance, instance terminations, and other lifecycle events.