Why 3 masters and 3 workers are needed to set a HA k8s cluster

9/18/2019

I am learning kubernetes by following the official documentation and in the Creating Highly Available clusters with kubeadm part it's recommended to use 3 masters and 3 workers as a minimum required to set a HA cluster.

This recommendation is given with no explanation about the reasons behind it. In other words, why a 2 masters and 2 workers configuration is not ok with HA ?

-- farhawa
distributed-computing
high-availability
kubernetes
scalability

1 Answer

9/18/2019

You want an uneven number of master eligible nodes, so you can form a proper quorum (two out of three, three out of five). The total number of nodes doesn't actually matter. Smaller installation often make the same node master eligible and data holding at the same time, so in that case you'd prefer an uneven number of nodes. Once you move to a setup with dedicated master eligible nodes, you're freed from that restriction. You could also run 4 nodes with a quorum of 3, but that will make the cluster unavailable if any two nodes die. The worst setup is 2 nodes since you can only safely run with a quorum of 2, so if a node dies you're unavailable.

(This was an answer from here which I think is a good explanation)

-- Spazzy757
Source: StackOverflow