The cluster planned upgrade feature of Tencent Kubernetes Engine (TKE) is a planned upgrade service for container cluster components provided by Tencent Cloud. It supports planned upgrades for components of TKE standard clusters and TKE Serverless clusters. It provides enterprise-level customers with refined change maintenance window management. The feature also supports custom cluster release sequences based on upgrade tags, meeting the needs of enterprise-level customers for multi-environment collaborative upgrades and compliance control. The feature provides built-in pre-upgrade and post-upgrade checks, which ensure the security and stability of business operations.
Why Use Planned Upgrade
Expired component versions may pose stability and security risks. Tencent Cloud will stop fixing feature issues and security vulnerabilities on expired cluster component versions, and will provide only limited technical support. Enabling the cluster planned upgrade feature keeps components on supported versions, reducing risk from long-term use of expired components.
The cluster planned upgrade feature can reduce the Ops pressure of continuous cluster component version maintenance. Tencent Cloud automatically pushes cluster component upgrade tasks to ensure that clusters run on stable, supported component versions, eliminating the need for manual version maintenance and improving Ops efficiency.
Upgrade Scope
The planned upgrade scope includes control plane components (such as kube-apiserver) managed on the Tencent Cloud side, as well as system components (such as coredns and kubernetes-proxy) deployed in user clusters. User node components are excluded. TKE will strive to upgrade cluster components in accordance with the user-configured maintenance window. However, to maintain continuous security and stability of user clusters, emergency changes may be performed outside the maintenance window in critical scenarios, such as applying security vulnerability fixes, to rapidly mitigate risks.
Features
Refined maintenance window management: Support configuring maintenance windows at the region and cluster levels, enabling refined upgrade window management for clusters.
Custom release order: Support orchestrating the cluster upgrade order based on tags and provide grayscale capabilities for cluster upgrades.
Pre-upgrade and post-upgrade checks: Provide built-in pre-upgrade and post-upgrade checks to ensure the stable operation of components after the upgrade.
User Guide
Must-Knows
To enable the cluster planned upgrade feature, ensure that the cluster has a configured maintenance window at the region or cluster level. Clusters without an available maintenance window cannot enable this feature. For details about the maintenance window configuration at the region and cluster levels, see Maintenance Windows and Exclusion Items. Cluster upgrade sequence orchestration depends on cluster tags to group clusters into different release batches. Users can customize the cluster release order by configuring tags for different batches in the release sequence. If a cluster lacks a release sequence tag or its tag does not match any entry in the release sequence, the cluster components will be excluded from the release sequence. Clusters not included in the release sequence will follow the default grayscale policy for upgrade. For details about the cluster upgrade tags and release sequence configuration, see Cluster Orchestration.