A | B | C | D | H | I | K | M | N | O | P | S | T | W

A

Add-ons

Services beyond the fundamental components of Kubernetes.

Core Add-ons: Addons that are required to deploy a Kubernetes-conformant cluster: DNS, kube-proxy, CNI.
Additional Add-ons: Addons that are not required for a Kubernetes-conformant cluster (e.g. metrics/Heapster, Dashboard).

B

The process of turning a server into a Kubernetes node. This may involve assembling data to provide when creating the server that backs the Machine, as well as runtime configuration of the software running on that server.

Bootstrap cluster

A temporary cluster that is used to provision a Target Management cluster.

C

CAEP

Cluster API Enhancement Proposal - patterned after KEP. See template

CAPI

Core Cluster API

CAPA

Cluster API Provider AWS

CABPK

Cluster API Bootstrap Provider Kubeadm

CAPC

Cluster API Provider CloudStack

CAPD

Cluster API Provider Docker

CAPDO

Cluster API Provider DigitalOcean

CAPG

Cluster API Google Cloud Provider

CAPH

Cluster API Provider Hetzner

CAPIBM

Cluster API Provider IBM Cloud

CAPN

Cluster API Provider Nested

CAPX

Cluster API Provider Nutanix

CAPK

Cluster API Provider Kubevirt

CAPO

Cluster API Provider OpenStack

CAPOCI

Cluster API Provider Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)

CAPV

Cluster API Provider vSphere

CAPVC

Cluster API Provider vcluster

CAPZ

Cluster API Provider Azure

Cluster

A full Kubernetes deployment. See Management Cluster and Workload Cluster.

Cluster API

Or Cluster API project

The Cluster API sub-project of the SIG-cluster-lifecycle. It is also used to refer to the software components, APIs, and community that produce them.

Control plane

The set of Kubernetes services that form the basis of a cluster. See also https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/#kubernetes-control-plane There are two variants:

Self-provisioned: A Kubernetes control plane consisting of pods or machines wholly managed by a single Cluster API deployment.
External: A control plane offered and controlled by some system other than Cluster API (e.g., GKE, AKS, EKS, IKS).

D

Default implementation

A feature implementation offered as part of the Cluster API project, infrastructure providers can swap it out for a different one.

H

Horizontal Scaling

The ability to add more machines based on policy and well defined metrics. For example, add a machine to a cluster when CPU load average > (X) for a period of time (Y).

Host

see Server

I

Infrastructure provider

A source of computational resources (e.g. machines, networking, etc.). Examples for cloud include AWS, Azure, Google, etc.; for bare metal include VMware, MAAS, metal3.io, etc. When there is more than one way to obtain resources from the same infrastructure provider (e.g. EC2 vs. EKS) each way is referred to as a variant.

Instance

see Server

Immutability

A resource that does not mutate. In kubernetes we often state the instance of a running pod is immutable or does not change once it is run. In order to make a change, a new pod is run. In the context of Cluster API we often refer to a running instance of a Machine as being immutable, from a Cluster API perspective.

K

Kubernetes-conformant

Or Kubernetes-compliant

A cluster that passes the Kubernetes conformance tests.

k/k

Refers to the main Kubernetes git repository or the main Kubernetes project.

M

Machine

Or Machine Resource

The Custom Resource for Kubernetes that represents a request to have a place to run kubelet.

Manage a cluster

Perform create, scale, upgrade, or destroy operations on the cluster.

Management cluster

The cluster where one or more Infrastructure Providers run, and where resources (e.g. Machines) are stored. Typically referred to when you are provisioning multiple workload clusters.

Multi-tenancy

Multi tenancy in Cluster API defines the capability of an infrastructure provider to manage different credentials, each one of them corresponding to an infrastructure tenant.

Please note that up until v1alpha3 this concept had a different meaning, referring to the capability to run multiple instances of the same provider, each one with its own credentials; starting from v1alpha4 we are disambiguating the two concepts.

See Multi-tenancy and Support multiple instances.

N

Node pools

A node pool is a group of nodes within a cluster that all have the same configuration.

O

Operating system

Or OS

A generically understood combination of a kernel and system-level userspace interface, such as Linux or Windows, as opposed to a particular distribution.

P

Pivot

Pivot is a process for moving the provider components and declared cluster-api resources from a Source Management cluster to a Target Management cluster.

The pivot process is also used for deleting a management cluster and could also be used during an upgrade of the management cluster.

Provider

See Infrastructure Provider

Provider components

Refers to the YAML artifact a provider publishes as part of their releases which is required to use the provider components, it usually contains Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), Deployments (to run the controller manager), RBAC, etc.

Provider implementation

Existing Cluster API implementations consist of generic and infrastructure provider-specific logic. The infrastructure provider-specific logic is currently maintained in infrastructure provider repositories.

S

W

Workload Cluster

A cluster created by a ClusterAPI controller, which is not a bootstrap cluster, and is meant to be used by end-users, as opposed to by CAPI tooling.

The Cluster API Book