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Set up CoreDNS as DNS provider for Cluster Federation

Deprecated

Use of Federation v1 is strongly discouraged. Federation V1 never achieved GA status and is no longer under active development. Documentation is for historical purposes only.

For more information, see the intended replacement, Kubernetes Federation v2.

This page shows how to configure and deploy CoreDNS to be used as the DNS provider for Cluster Federation.

Objectives

Before you begin

Deploying CoreDNS and etcd charts

CoreDNS can be deployed in various configurations. Explained below is a reference and can be tweaked to suit the needs of the platform and the cluster federation.

To deploy CoreDNS, we shall make use of helm charts. CoreDNS will be deployed with etcd as the backend and should be pre-installed. etcd can also be deployed using helm charts. Shown below are the instructions to deploy etcd.

helm install --namespace my-namespace --name etcd-operator stable/etcd-operator
helm upgrade --namespace my-namespace --set cluster.enabled=true etcd-operator stable/etcd-operator

Note: etcd default deployment configurations can be overridden, suiting the host cluster.

After deployment succeeds, etcd can be accessed with the http://etcd-cluster.my-namespace:2379 endpoint within the host cluster.

The CoreDNS default configuration should be customized to suit the federation. Shown below is the Values.yaml, which overrides the default configuration parameters on the CoreDNS chart.

isClusterService: false
serviceType: "LoadBalancer"
plugins:
  kubernetes:
    enabled: false
  etcd:
    enabled: true
    zones:
    - "example.com."
    endpoint: "http://etcd-cluster.my-namespace:2379"

The above configuration file needs some explanation:

Now deploy CoreDNS by running

helm install --namespace my-namespace --name coredns -f Values.yaml stable/coredns

Verify that both etcd and CoreDNS pods are running as expected.

Deploying Federation with CoreDNS as DNS provider

The Federation control plane can be deployed using kubefed init. CoreDNS can be chosen as the DNS provider by specifying two additional parameters.

--dns-provider=coredns
--dns-provider-config=coredns-provider.conf

coredns-provider.conf has below format:

[Global]
etcd-endpoints = http://etcd-cluster.my-namespace:2379
zones = example.com.
coredns-endpoints = <coredns-server-ip>:<port>
Note: plugins.etcd.zones in the CoreDNS configuration and the --dns-zone-name flag to kubefed init should match.

Setup CoreDNS server in nameserver resolv.conf chain

Note: The following section applies only to versions prior to v1.7 and will be automatically taken care of if the coredns-endpoints parameter is configured in coredns-provider.conf as described in section above.

Once the federation control plane is deployed and federated clusters are joined to the federation, you need to add the CoreDNS server to the pod’s nameserver resolv.conf chain in all the federated clusters as this self hosted CoreDNS server is not discoverable publicly. This can be achieved by adding the below line to dnsmasq container’s arg in kube-dns deployment.

--server=/example.com./<CoreDNS endpoint>

Replace example.com above with federation domain.

Now the federated cluster is ready for cross-cluster service discovery!

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