Kubernetes Features
DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS) is a managed Kubernetes service. Deploy Kubernetes clusters with a fully managed control plane, high availability, autoscaling, and native integration with DigitalOcean Load Balancers and volumes. DOKS clusters are compatible with standard Kubernetes toolchains and the DigitalOcean API and CLI.
Kubernetes is an open-source system for managing containerized applications in a clustered environment. Its focus is to improve how you manage related, distributed components and services across varied infrastructure.
DigitalOcean Kubernetes is a managed Kubernetes service lets you deploy scalable and secure Kubernetes clusters without the complexities of administrating the control plane. We manage the Kubernetes control plane and the underlying containerized infrastructure.
You retain full access to the cluster with existing toolchains. You have cluster-level administrative rights to create and delete any Kubernetes API objects through the DigitalOcean API and doctl.
There are no restrictions on the API objects you can create as long as the underlying Kubernetes version supports them. We offer the latest version of Kubernetes as well as earlier patch levels of the latest minor version for special use cases. You can also install popular tools like Helm, metrics-server, and Istio.
We only support features that are in a beta and general availability stage in upstream Kubernetes. See the Kubernetes documentation to check which feature is in the alpha, beta or general availability stage.
For updates on DOKS’s latest features and integrations, see the DOKS release notes. For a full list of changes for each available version of Kubernetes, including updates to the backend, API, and system components, see the DOKS changelog.
Conformance Certification
DOKS conforms to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s Kubernetes Software Conformance Certification program and is proud to be a CNCF Certified Kubernetes product.
In addition, we run our own extended suite of end-to-end tests on every DOKS release to ensure stability, performance, and upgrade compatibility.
Worker Nodes and Node Pools
Worker nodes are built on Droplets, but unlike standalone Droplets, worker nodes are managed with the Kubernetes command-line client kubectl and are not accessible with SSH. On both the control plane and the worker nodes, DigitalOcean maintains the system updates, security patches, operating system configuration and installed packages.
All the worker nodes within a node pool have identical resources, but each node pool can have a different worker configuration. This lets you have different services on different node pools, where each pool has the RAM, CPU, and attached storage resources the service requires.
You can create and modify node pools at any time. Worker nodes are automatically deleted and recreated when needed, and you can manually recycle worker nodes. Nodes in the node pool will inherit the node pool’s naming scheme when you first create a node pool, however, renaming a node pool will not rename the nodes. Nodes will inherit the new naming scheme only when they are recycled or the node pool is resized, creating new nodes.
Kubernetes role-based access control (RBAC) is enabled by default. See Using RBAC Authorization for details.
Persistent Data
You can persist data in DigitalOcean Kubernetes clusters to volumes using the DigitalOcean CSI plugin. (See the feature overview page to learn which volume features are available on DigitalOcean Kubernetes.) We recommend against using HostPath volumes because nodes are frequently replaced and all data stored on the nodes will be lost.
You can also persist data to DigitalOcean object storage by using the Spaces API to interact with Spaces from within your application.
Load Balancing
The DigitalOcean Kubernetes Cloud Controller supports provisioning DigitalOcean Load Balancers.
VPC Networks
Clusters are added to a VPC network for the datacenter region by default. This keeps traffic between clusters and other applicable resources from being routed outside the datacenter over the public internet.
Cluster networking is preconfigured with Cilium. Overlay networking is preconfigured with Cilium and supports network policies.
Tags
Clusters are automatically tagged with k8s and the specific cluster ID, like k8s:EXAMPLEc-3515-4a0c-91a3-2452eEXAMPLE. Worker nodes are additionally tagged with k8s:worker.
You can add custom tags to a cluster and its node pools. Any custom tags added to worker nodes in a node pool (for example, from the Droplets page), are deleted to maintain consistency between the node pool and its worker nodes.