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A comment on Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster management fee on June 6. Parent comment

Re:Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster managem... by stas2k on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @04:26PM (#22488324)
Don't want to sound snarky, but how about an upgrade path from 3.11 to 4.x? I am a heavy Openshift user and it seems that RH just dumped whatever architecture they had with pre-4 clusters and switched to a Tectonic-like 4.x installations without any way to upgrade other than a new installation. This makes it hard to migrate with physical nodes.
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Re:Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster managem... by bgracely on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @07:28PM (#22489749)
There is a free tool to help with migrations from OpenShift 3.x to 4.x - https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/openshift_cont...

It's not a rolling upgrade, but it allows you to move the apps, PVs, policies in as granular a manner as you wish.

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Re:Google Kubernetes Engine is introducing a cluster managem... by freedomben on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @08:01PM (#22489923)
Not snarky at all, you are more correct than you may realize. The upgrade is a challenge because we move from RHEL 7 to Red Hat CoreOS 8 as the host OS, as well move all the OpenShift code to operators instead of in the binary. OpenShift itself can now also manage the nodes (thanks to RHCOS), as well as fully self-upgrade. For container runtime we move from Docker to CRI-O (for a number of reasons, high on the list is security). It's a massive overhaul which is really more akin to a brand new product than a major version. I generally can't stand major overhauls because most of the time they don't give you much new and often bring regressions. However, this really was a tremendous improvement, the fruits of which are not even fully realized.

Because of that major change, the cluster upgrade path is a little more involved than usual. It's a complete reinstall of the OS and rebuild of the cluster. There are tools to help tho, and as the path is tread things will get easier and better supported. If you go through the same wave as me, you'll be annoyed at first but then once it is done and you have a 4.x cluster you'll be really happy with it (especially when you can manage everything as an operator).

Luckily from an app perspective very little will change since Kubernetes is the API. A sibling comment linked to some helpful documentation. I can't be specific right now but I can tell you that your need is known, and some very smart people are working on it. If you want to email me (check my HN bio page) or jump in the Keybase group called "openshift_okd," I'm happy to chat more about it (not in an official Red Hat support capacity, just as friend to friend :-) ). I haven't done a migration myself yet but I know people who have, and I plan to get into it personally soon as well.

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