Understanding the Managedk8s Kubernets Upgrade Process

The cluster architecture comprises a control plane and associated node pools.

  1. The control plane upgrade is managed entirely by the cloud provider and performed in the backend services. The control pane is upgraded first followed by the node pools.
  2. The node pool upgrade follows a rollout approach. For each node in the pool, a new node is provisioned with the new Kubernetes version.
  3. The existing node is then drained, allowing all active pods to migrate seamlessly to the newly provisioned node.
  4. This process is repeated one node at a time until all nodes in the node pool are upgraded.
  5. Once all node pools have been upgraded, the cluster upgrade is considered complete.