Skip to content

Understanding Regional Components Segregation#

Up until 1.4.0, all k0rdent components including the API and cluster resources ran in the management cluster. With regional support, you’ll now be able to register another cluster as a regional cluster. As a result:

  • The management cluster can focus on control plane operations. The management cluster is a single place to manage ClusterDeployments, Credentials, Backups, Templates, and so on.
  • The regional cluster becomes the place where the actual objects to implement those k0rdent concepts, such as Clusters and Machines, and the related infrastructure, actually created.

Depending on the setup, the management cluster in k0rdent can be dedicated exclusively to control-plane operations, with no providers enabled (in spec.providers of the Management object). In this setup, it can serve only as a single pane of glass for managing the k0rdent platform, hosting no actual child cluster workloads, just their definitions for management.

Regional Cluster Components#

A regional cluster contains the following regional core components installed by k0rdent:

  1. CAPI operator
  2. CAPI providers (enabled in the spec.providers of the Region object)
  3. Cert Manager
  4. Velero and so on.

The following cluster-related resources are created within the regional cluster (for ClusterDeployments that were created in the region):

  1. All infrastructure objects (CAPI cluster, machines, and so on)
  2. ClusterIdentity objects for accessing cloud resources
  3. Sveltos objects

Management Cluster Components#

A management cluster contains the following components:

  1. All regional core components (CAPI operator, Cert Manager, Velero, and so on)
  2. Only the CAPI providers enabled in the spec.providers field of the Management object
  3. The K0rdent API (Credential, ClusterDeployment, Templates, and so on)
  4. Flux's Helm and Source controllers to install and manage subcomponents and so on.

Additionally, the management cluster hosts the cluster-related resources (Cluster, Machine, and so on) for ClusterDeployments that were created in the management cluster (and not a regional cluster), which is the default.