Customizing components with the kubeadm API

This page covers how to customize the components that kubeadm deploys. For control plane components you can use flags in the ClusterConfiguration structure or patches per-node. For the kubelet and kube-proxy you can use KubeletConfiguration and KubeProxyConfiguration, accordingly.

All of these options are possible via the kubeadm configuration API. For more details on each field in the configuration you can navigate to our API reference pages.

Customizing the control plane with flags in ClusterConfiguration

The kubeadm ClusterConfiguration object exposes a way for users to override the default flags passed to control plane components such as the APIServer, ControllerManager, Scheduler and Etcd. The components are defined using the following structures:

• apiServer
• controllerManager
• scheduler
• etcd

These structures contain a common extraArgs field, that consists of name / value pairs. To override a flag for a control plane component:

1. Add the appropriate extraArgs to your configuration.
2. Add flags to the extraArgs field.
3. Run kubeadm init with --config <YOUR CONFIG YAML>.

APIServer flags

For details, see the reference documentation for kube-apiserver.

Example usage:

apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta4
kind: ClusterConfiguration
kubernetesVersion: v1.16.0
apiServer:
  extraArgs:
  - name: "enable-admission-plugins"
    value: "AlwaysPullImages,DefaultStorageClass"
  - name: "audit-log-path"
    value: "/home/johndoe/audit.log"

ControllerManager flags

For details, see the reference documentation for kube-controller-manager.

Example usage:

apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta4
kind: ClusterConfiguration
kubernetesVersion: v1.16.0
controllerManager:
  extraArgs:
  - name: "cluster-signing-key-file"
    value: "/home/johndoe/keys/ca.key"
  - name: "deployment-controller-sync-period"
    value: "50"

Scheduler flags

For details, see the reference documentation for kube-scheduler.

Example usage:

apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta4
kind: ClusterConfiguration
kubernetesVersion: v1.16.0
scheduler:
  extraArgs:
  - name: "config"
    value: "/etc/kubernetes/scheduler-config.yaml"
  extraVolumes:
    - name: schedulerconfig
      hostPath: /home/johndoe/schedconfig.yaml
      mountPath: /etc/kubernetes/scheduler-config.yaml
      readOnly: true
      pathType: "File"

Etcd flags

For details, see the etcd server documentation.

Example usage:

apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta4
kind: ClusterConfiguration
etcd:
  local:
    extraArgs:
    - name: "election-timeout"
      value: 1000

Customizing with patches

Kubeadm allows you to pass a directory with patch files to InitConfiguration and JoinConfiguration on individual nodes. These patches can be used as the last customization step before component configuration is written to disk.

You can pass this file to kubeadm init with --config <YOUR CONFIG YAML>:

apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta4
kind: InitConfiguration
patches:
  directory: /home/user/somedir

You can pass this file to kubeadm join with --config <YOUR CONFIG YAML>:

apiVersion: kubeadm.k8s.io/v1beta4
kind: JoinConfiguration
patches:
  directory: /home/user/somedir

The directory must contain files named target[suffix][+patchtype].extension. For example, kube-apiserver0+merge.yaml or just etcd.json.

• target can be one of kube-apiserver, kube-controller-manager, kube-scheduler, etcd and kubeletconfiguration.
• suffix is an optional string that can be used to determine which patches are applied first alpha-numerically.
• patchtype can be one of strategic, merge or json and these must match the patching formats supported by kubectl. The default patchtype is strategic.
• extension must be either json or yaml.

Customizing the kubelet

To customize the kubelet you can add a KubeletConfiguration next to the ClusterConfiguration or InitConfiguration separated by --- within the same configuration file. This file can then be passed to kubeadm init and kubeadm will apply the same base KubeletConfiguration to all nodes in the cluster.

For applying instance-specific configuration over the base KubeletConfiguration you can use the kubeletconfiguration patch target.

Alternatively, you can use kubelet flags as overrides by passing them in the nodeRegistration.kubeletExtraArgs field supported by both InitConfiguration and JoinConfiguration. Some kubelet flags are deprecated, so check their status in the kubelet reference documentation before using them.

For additional details see Configuring each kubelet in your cluster using kubeadm

Customizing kube-proxy

To customize kube-proxy you can pass a KubeProxyConfiguration next your ClusterConfiguration or InitConfiguration to kubeadm init separated by ---.

For more details you can navigate to our API reference pages.