Upgrade Kubernetes from 1.23 to 1.24

In the last blog post, I introduced using Kubernetes to set up highly available infrastructure. I had that setup a long time ago. I did the long overdue upgrade for Kubernetes from 1.23 to 1.24 recently. Since GlusterFS is deprecated(though not removed) in 1.25, I have no plans to continue the upgrade without exploring alternative storage options.

There is a big change from 1.23 to 1.24 as well, namely, Docker Engine support has been removed. I migrated the container engine to containerd. But the process is not without pain. I needed to search different sources to fix the issues. So I list my upgrade steps so that if anyone has the same issue, this may help.

My Kubernetes cluster is set up locally with kubeadm. There is an official upgrade guide for kubeadm to upgrade from 1.23 to 1.24, but it doesn’t mention any steps to remove Docker and set up containerd. So here are the steps I took:

1. Add --container-runtime-endpoint option to kubelet. The way I did it is by adding KUBELET_ARGS="--container-runtime-endpoint=/run/containerd/containerd.sock" to /etc/kubernetes/kubelet.env. Without this, Kubelet will fail to start.
2. Remove --network-plugin=cni from /var/lib/kubelet/kubeadm-flags.env.
3. Add the following configuration in /etc/crictl.yaml, otherwise kubeadm will not be able to pull needed images:

   runtime-endpoint: unix:///run/containerd/containerd.sock
   image-endpoint: unix:///run/containerd/containerd.sock
   timeout: 10
   debug: false
   

4. Configure SystemdCgroup permission for containerd. Otherwise kube-apiserver will always be restarted because of “sandbox environment changes” (see more in GitHub issue):

   sudo mkdir -p /etc/containerd/
   containerd config default | sudo tee /etc/containerd/config.toml
   sudo sed -i 's/SystemdCgroup \= false/SystemdCgroup \= true/g' /etc/containerd/config.toml
   sudo systemctl restart containerd
   

5. Follow the official upgrade guide.
6. After the upgrade, remember to restart Docker so that the old containers started by Docker will be stopped.