How to create a Kubernetes cluster using droplets ?

Heya, @bidhanbst

First, put every droplet in the same region and the same VPC, and use their private IPs for all Kubernetes control-plane traffic. In the DO panel, each droplet should show a Private network address. If they’re in different VPCs, move them into one VPC (same region) and confirm you can ping other-private-ip from each node. If pings fail but public pings work, it’s VPC or the firewall.

Second, join the cluster with the private addresses explicitly so kubelet and the API server don’t try to talk over the public NIC

Hope that this helps!

Hi Bidhan,

Can you share a bit more about how you set up the cluster on Droplets? For example, which tool you used (kubeadm, k3s, something else) and whether you configured a private VPC network.

By default Droplets in the same VPC should be able to talk to each other over their private IPs, so if the master and worker nodes can’t connect, it may be a firewall or networking config issue during the cluster setup.

As an alternative, if you don’t specifically need to manage the control plane yourself, you might find it easier to use DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS). It’s a managed service that handles the networking and control plane for you, so you only need to worry about your workloads. Docs here:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/