index.adoc

Overview of machine management

You can use machine management to flexibly work with underlying infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), {rh-openstack-first}, and VMware vSphere to manage the {product-title} cluster. You can control the cluster and perform auto-scaling, such as scaling up and down the cluster based on specific workload policies.

It is important to have a cluster that adapts to changing workloads. The {product-title} cluster can horizontally scale up and down when the load increases or decreases.

Machine management is implemented as a custom resource definition (CRD). A CRD object defines a new unique object Kind in the cluster and enables the Kubernetes API server to handle the object’s entire lifecycle.

The Machine API Operator provisions the following resources:

• MachineSet

• Machine

• ClusterAutoscaler

• MachineAutoscaler

• MachineHealthCheck

modules/machine-api-overview.adoc

Additional resources

• Machine phases and lifecycle

Managing compute machines

As a cluster administrator, you can perform the following actions:

• Create a compute machine set for the following cloud providers:

  • AWS

  • Azure

  • Azure Stack Hub

  • GCP

  • IBM Cloud

  • IBM Power Virtual Server

  • Nutanix

  • {rh-openstack}

  • vSphere

• Create a machine set for a bare metal deployment: Creating a compute machine set on bare metal

• Manually scale a compute machine set by adding or removing a machine from the compute machine set.

• Updating compute machine configurations through the MachineSet YAML configuration file.

• Delete a machine.

• Create infrastructure compute machine sets.

• Configure and deploy a machine health check to automatically fix damaged machines in a machine pool.

Managing control plane machines

As a cluster administrator, you can perform the following actions:

• Update your control plane configuration with a control plane machine set for the following cloud providers:

  • {aws-full}

  • {gcp-full}

  • {azure-full}

  • Nutanix

  • {rh-openstack-first}

  • {vmw-full}

• Configure and deploy a machine health check to automatically recover unhealthy control plane machines.

Applying autoscaling to an {product-title} cluster

You can automatically scale your {product-title} cluster to ensure flexibility for changing workloads. To autoscale your cluster, you must first deploy a cluster autoscaler, and then deploy a machine autoscaler for each compute machine set.

• The cluster autoscaler increases and decreases the size of the cluster based on deployment needs.

• The machine autoscaler adjusts the number of machines in the compute machine sets that you deploy in your {product-title} cluster.

Adding compute machines on user-provisioned infrastructure

User-provisioned infrastructure is an environment where you can deploy infrastructure such as compute, network, and storage resources that host the {product-title}. You can add compute machines to a cluster on user-provisioned infrastructure during or after the installation process.

Adding RHEL compute machines to your cluster

As a cluster administrator, you can perform the following actions:

• Add Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) compute machines, also known as worker machines, to a user-provisioned infrastructure cluster or an installation-provisioned infrastructure cluster.

• Add more Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) compute machines to an existing cluster.