Question
Use Cilium Cluster Mesh in DOKS
- Posted on April 1, 2025
- DigitalOcean Managed KubernetesDigitalOcean KubernetesKubernetes
Asked by julien
Hello everyone, I wanted to know if it was possible to use Cilium Cluster Mesh with managed DOKS ? I tried to use it with DOKS but I had to remove existing Cilium installation (i’m pretty sure it’s a bad idea), I can’t make it works (maybe i’m doing something wrong, i’m still searching for a solution) but I’m wondering if there is any blocking point using Cluster Mesh in DOKS ? Thanks !
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Hey Julien 👋
From what I know, DOKS comes with a managed Cilium installation by default, and trying to remove or override it can definitely lead to issues if it is possible at all.
That said, there might be a way to get Cluster Mesh working with a custom setup, but I haven’t seen a solid working example just yet.
If it’s something critical to your use case, it might be worth reaching out to the DigitalOcean Support to ask if there are any recent workarounds or plans to support this kind of setup.
Would be super curious to hear how it goes if you manage to get it working!
- Bobby
That’s a very good question. I would also like to use Cilium Cluster Mesh.
In my use case, there’s a main cluster hosted on DOKS, which would contain central administrative services. In addition, there would be several other clusters spread across multiple regions (for video storage and streaming). Because of the long distance between them, they can’t be part of the same cluster. However, it would be ideal to handle gRPC communication over a private service network.
From what I can see, DigitalOcean’s managed Cilium network reverts to its desired state, so the global network can’t be persistently enabled.