At DigitalOcean, we strive to create a simple and safe managed Kubernetes experience so that you can scale your business with intuitive developer tools. Today, we are thrilled to announce that DigitalOcean Kubernetes’ High Availability (HA) control plane now includes a 99.95% Service Level Agreement (SLA) to provide confidence that your control plane is fault-tolerant no matter the load. Additionally, all DigitalOcean Kubernetes users can enjoy our new, faster, and more powerful control plane at no cost.
Kubernetes is an incredibly popular tool that produces workloads that can scale and heal themselves, saving resources and introducing automation to your infrastructure. However, if your control plane fails, your workloads may keep running, but it can’t schedule new workloads or perform cluster-level operations. This weakness in Kubernetes is a single point of failure, and because of this behavior, a resilient and scalable control plane is a must-have, especially for those running production workloads. Our High Availability control plane gives you confidence that you can rely on DigitalOcean Kubernetes.
When High Availability is enabled, DigitalOcean Kubernetes runs three replicas of your control plane to ensure better performance and uptime. We offer a 99.95% Service Level Agreement (SLA) per month for the new control plane with High Availability. If you experience downtime beyond this level, we’ll credit your DigitalOcean account.
Configuring HA is straightforward and costs an additional $40/month. Spin up an HA cluster using the UI in a click, with doctl CLI, or Terraform.
To create the new DigitalOcean Kubernetes control plane we leveraged the latest cloud-native and open source technologies including the ClusterAPI for API-based cluster management. We containerized the control plane components and used Kubernetes to manage them, a concept referred to as Kubeception. Because containers are so lightweight, we can spin up new control planes faster than ever. See below for diagrams outlining how the new control plane differs from the legacy control plane.
The below enhancements to the control plane are applicable for all the DigitalOcean(DOKS) users regardless if you have HA enabled or not:
All new DigitalOcean Kubernetes clusters are now managed by the new control plane, which comes free with DigitalOcean Kubernetes.
In addition to the benefits that come with the new control plane, when HA is enabled on your clusters, your control plane will have an SLA of 99.95%. Enabling HA is straightforward. It is just a simple check-box or a CLI flag during the cluster creation. If you choose to enable High Availability, you pay $40/month for the control plane. We currently don’t support HA for existing clusters, so to utilize HA you will need to create new clusters.
We are committed to making the DigitalOcean Kubernetes experience simple for startups and tech-enabled small businesses. We look forward to working with you as you scale your business on DOKS.
Happy Coding,
Udhay Ravindran
Senior Product Manager, Kubernetes