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Upgrading Talos

Talos upgrades are effected by an API call. The talosctl CLI utility will facilitate this, or you can use the automatic upgrade features provided by the talos controller manager.

Video Walkthrough

To see a live demo of this writeup, see the video below:

talosctl Upgrade

To manually upgrade a Talos node, you will specify the node’s IP address and the installer container image for the version of Talos to which you wish to upgrade.

For instance, if your Talos node has the IP address 10.20.30.40 and you want to install the official version v0.7.0-beta.0, you would enter a command such as:

  $ talosctl upgrade --nodes 10.20.30.40 \
      --image ghcr.io/talos-systems/installer:v0.7.0-beta.0

There is an option to this command: --preserve, which can be used to explicitly tell Talos to either keep intact its ephemeral data or not. In most cases, it is correct to just let Talos perform its default action. However, if you are running a single-node control-plane, you will want to make sure that --preserve=true.

Talos Controller Manager

The Talos Controller Manager can coordinate upgrades of your nodes automatically.
It ensures that a controllable number of nodes are being upgraded at any given time. It also applies an upgrade flow which allows you to classify some machines as early adopters and others as getting only stable, tested versions.

To find out more about the controller manager and to get it installed and configured, take a look at the GitHub page. Please note that the controller manager is still in fairly early development. More advanced features, such as time slot scheduling, will be coming in the future.

Changelog and Upgrade Notes

In an effort to create more production ready clusters, Talos will now taint control plane nodes as unschedulable. This means that any application you might have deployed must tolerate this taint if you intend on running the application on control plane nodes.

Another feature you will notice is the automatic uncordoning of nodes that have been upgraded. Talos will now uncordon a node if the cordon was initiated by the upgrade process.

Talosctl

The talosctl CLI now requires an explicit set of nodes. This can be configured with talos config nodes or set on the fly with talos --nodes.

Last modified March 18, 2022: docs: overhaul all the docs (e3fda049f)