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System Requirements

Recommendations for Requirements

These are recommendations for requirements of Kubernetes Masters and Nodes.

General

Network:

  • Bandwidth: at the very least 1G, recommended for smaller, lower traffic environents is 10G, 25G or more.

Note

To reduce costs you can get away with just having a single interface, instead of, e.g., 2 interfaces being bonded together (it also reduces complexity).

Master

Storage

SSDs or even NVMe based storage is more expensive but your ETCD will love and need it!

DO NOT USE HDDs nor any kind of networked storage for ETCD!

Even a fast Ceph RBD (e.g., when running in VMs) can look good in the beginning but might "kill" the ETCD performance in the end!

Too many users of Kubernetes or OpenShift do that and end up with slow performing clusters in many different ways, simply because the ETCD is slow (even though the kube-apiservers are caching a lot)

Use at least SSDs (minimum SATA based, better NVMe based) or any other storage with low latencies! ETCD is pretty much latency bound. It needs "few" IOPS but latency is the killer (sequential writing, e.g., WAL and DB).