MicroK8s Addons

[evilnick]

There are two types of Addons, Core Addons maintained and officially supported by the MicroK8s team at Canonical, and Community Addons.

See also: How to manage Addons, Setting up your own repository

Addons in the Core Repository

name	description	version	compatibility
cert-manager	Certificate management for Kubernetes clusters
community	Enables the community addons repository
dns	Deploys CoreDNS. It is recommended that this addon is always enabled.
dashboard	The standard Kubernetes Dashboard.
gpu	Enable support for GPU accelerated workloads using the NVIDIA runtime.
ha-cluster	Allows for high availability on clusters with at least three nodes.
helm	Installs the Helm 3 package manager for Kubernetes
helm3	Transition addon introducing the Helm 3 package manager
hostpath-storage	Create a default storage class which allocates storage from a host directory. Note!: The add-on uses simple filesystem storage local to the node where it was added. Not suitable for a production environment or clusters
host-access	Provides a fixed IP for access to the host’s services.
ingress	A simple ingress controller for external access.
kube-ovn	The feature rich Kube-OVN network fabric.
mayastor	Multi-node zero-ops storage option powered by Mayastor
minio	Cloud-agnostic S3-compatible object storage.
metallb	Deploys the MetalLB Loadbalancer. Note that currently this does not work on macOS, due to network filtering.
metrics-server	Adds the Kubernetes Metrics Server for API access to service metrics.
prometheus	Deploys the Prometheus Operator.
rbac	Enable Role Based Access Control for authorisation. Note that this is incompatible with some other add-ons.
rook-ceph	Rook turns distributed storage systems into self-managing, self-scaling, self-healing storage services.
registry	Deploy a private image registry and expose it on localhost:32000.
storage	DEPRECATED - Replaced by the hostpath-storage addon.

Addons in the Community Repository

This collection of third party and community maintained addons can be enabled with:

microk8s enable community

Here is what is currently included:

name	description	version	compatibility
ambassador	Ambassador is an API and Ingress controller
argocd	Deploys Argo CD, the declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes.
cilium	Deploys Cilium to support Kubernetes network policies using eBPF.
easyhaproxy	Adds EasyHAProxy for automatic ingress.
fluentd	Deploy the Elasticsearch-Fluentd-Kibana logging and monitoring solution.
gopaddle-lite	Simple “no-code” platform for Kubernetes developers.
inaccel	Simplify FPGA management and application lifecycle with InAccel.
istio	Adds the core Istio services (not available on arm64 arch).
jaeger	Deploy the Jaeger Operator in the “simplest” configuration.
kata	Adds Kata containers support - A secure container runtime with lightweight virtual machines.
keda	Deploys KEDA - Kubernetes Event-driven Autoscaling operator.
knative	Adds the Knative middleware to your cluster
kubearmor	Provides policy-based security for workloads. See KubeArmor website .
kwasm	Add WebAssembly support to your Kubernetes nodes
linkerd	Deploys the linkerd service mesh
microcks	Open source Kubernetes native tool for API Mocking and Testing. Microcks is a Cloud Native Computing Sandbox project.
multus	Add multus for multiple network capability.
nfs	Adds NFS-based storage.
ondat	A Kubernetes-native persistent storage platform.
openebs	Add OpenEBS storage capability.
openfaas	OpenFaaS, the popular serverless framework.
osm-edge	Open Service Mesh Edge (OSM-Edge) fork from Open Service Mesh is a lightweight, extensible, Cloud Native service mesh built for Edge computing.
parking	Parking for static sites
portainer	Container management dashboard (see portainer.io).
shifu	Kubernetes native IoT development framework
sosivio	Predictive troubleshooting for Kubernetes
traefik	Adds the Traefik Kubernetes Ingress controller.
trivy	Open source security scanner for Kubernetes

[ck3mp3r]

Hi, it seems Linkerd and also Knative is now available for arm64…

• linkerd - Release edge-20.8.1 · linkerd/linkerd2 · GitHub
• knative - Version v0.19 release | Knative

[balchua1]

From 1.20 MicroK8s linkerd addon is now available on arm.

[SukramJ]

Hi,
what is the recommended way to update an add-on on microk8s?
I upgraded my cluster from 1.20 to 1.21 but e.g. dns still uses coredns 1.6.6 instead of 1.8.0.
I didn’t want to disable/enable the add-on to not miss some settings, so i decided to update the used image with microk8s.kubectl set image --namespace kube-system deployment.apps/coredns coredns=coredns/coredns:1.8.0.
Compared to the other microk9s procedures, this looks quite complicated to me.

I know that the dns add-on is very simple, but this was just an example.

BR

[evilnick]

@SukramJ Thanks for pointing this out. I don’t know if there is a better way to upgrade an add -on (@kjackal?), but this is definitely something we should mention in the upgrade docs

[badsyntax]

Pre-configured addons that ‘just work’ are great, but there are times when we might want to configure an addon. It would be useful if this page mentioned how to do so (by editing an addon manifest perhaps?)

[Usersina]

The hostpath-storage add-on is not intended to be used in a production environment and is not suitable for clusters.

What to use for production then?

I was in fact asking the same question before learning about StorageClasses, PersistentVolumes, PersistentVolumeClaims and all of that stuff.

• This video should provide a very solid foothold on what the above means

• Also check this out for an in depth how-to.

Getting started

This not not exactly a guide or anything but simply various resources I found out that might help people out.

1. I was using a custom cloud provider where I could create something called a Block storage which is a fast SSD that I mount to my controller VM.

2. Once I had a partition ready, I created an NFS Server from that.

3. I then took a look at NFS Storage provisioning in Kubernetes.

4. I also started using Helm which has saved my life more than I can count.

[evilnick]

Thanks for those resources - indeed, very useful if you need to better understand storage in K8s.
For MicroK8s clusters, the mayastore add-on is a great solution - docs here

[evilnick]

@Usersina From version 1.25 there is now an nfs addon too

[Usersina]

Neat addition! Although I prefer the helm way so it’s easier if I ever want to move to a managed cluster.

[mcordova1967]

I just installed the latest version: MicroK8s v1.26.0 revision 4390

The list of core Add-ons is outdated on this page (https://microk8s.io/docs/addons), observability is missing, also when enabling Prometheus a warning of deprecation is shown and observability is installed instead:

microk8s enable prometheus
Infer repository core for addon prometheus
DEPRECATION WARNING: 'prometheus' is deprecated and will soon be removed. Please use 'observability' instead.

Infer repository core for addon observability
Addon core/observability is already enabled

It would be great if you could add a tutorial section about getting started with the current observability add-on, I found an external resource for this, but it references the deprecated add-on prometheus:

https://www.server-world.info/en/note?os=Ubuntu_22.04&p=microk8s&f=7

[yada]

Hi,
Typo regarding Microcks community addon, can you update it?:
s/microrocks/microcks/
Thank you

[evilnick]

I updated that, sorry for the misspelling, I guess my fingers went too fast.