Deploying Metrics Server

Metrics Server enables use of the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler and Vertical Pod Autoscaler. It does this by gathering metrics data from the kubelets in a cluster. By default, the certificates in use by the kubelets will not be recognized by metrics-server. This can be solved by either configuring metrics-server to do no validation of the TLS certificates, or by modifying the kubelet configuration to rotate its certificates and use ones that will be recognized by metrics-server.

Node Configuration

To enable kubelet certificate rotation, all nodes should have the following Machine Config snippet:

machine:
  kubelet:
    extraArgs:
      rotate-server-certificates: true

Install During Bootstrap

We will want to ensure that new certificates for the kubelets are approved automatically. This can easily be done with the Kubelet Serving Certificate Approver, which will automatically approve the Certificate Signing Requests generated by the kubelets.

We can have Kubelet Serving Certificate Approver and metrics-server installed on the cluster automatically during bootstrap by adding the following snippet to the Cluster Config of the node that will be handling the bootstrap process:

cluster:
  extraManifests:
    - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alex1989hu/kubelet-serving-cert-approver/main/deploy/standalone-install.yaml
    - https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/metrics-server/releases/latest/download/components.yaml

Install After Bootstrap

If you choose not to use extraManifests to install Kubelet Serving Certificate Approver and metrics-server during bootstrap, you can install them once the cluster is online using kubectl:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alex1989hu/kubelet-serving-cert-approver/main/deploy/standalone-install.yaml
kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/metrics-server/releases/latest/download/components.yaml