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Clusters

Clusters connect and manage your Kubernetes instance. There are two types of clusters supported in Canine:

  • Multi-node Kubernetes cluster
  • Single node cluster

Both options expose a Kubernetes cluster that Canine manages, but the technical architecture is quite different.

Multi-node cluster​

A standard Kubernetes cluster is composed of a control plane and worker plane. In a standard managed Kubernetes setup provided by Digital Ocean, Linode, AWS, GCP, etc, the control plane is managed, thereby offloading the complexities of managing the uptime of a Kubernetes cluster to the cloud provider.

Single node cluster​

Often, you'll want to find the cheapest hosting providers (Hetzner is a common choice), who do not provide a managed Kubernetes offering. In that case, you can still get all the benefits of Canine, but you'll have to install a K3s instance. This is recommended to be used in staging, or low traffic environments.

Canine gives you the one line installation command to get everything set up.

Adding a Cluster​

  1. Navigate to Clusters and click + New Cluster
  2. Choose your setup method:
    • Managed Kubernetes - Paste the kubeconfig from your cloud provider
    • K3s (Single Node) - Run the provided install script on your VPS
  3. Give the cluster a name (lowercase, numbers, and hyphens only)
  4. Canine will test the connection and install default cluster packages

Cluster Features​

Metrics​

Once the metrics-server package is installed, Canine displays CPU and memory usage for your cluster's nodes and namespaces. Navigate to Clusters > Your Cluster > Metrics to view resource utilization.

Kubeconfig Download​

You can download the kubeconfig for any cluster to use with kubectl directly. Go to Clusters > Your Cluster and click Download Kubeconfig.

Connection Testing​

If you're experiencing issues, click Test Connection to verify that Canine can still communicate with the Kubernetes API.

TLS Verification​

By default, Canine verifies TLS certificates when connecting to the Kubernetes API. For clusters with self-signed certificates, you can disable TLS verification in the cluster settings.

Transfer Ownership​

Cluster ownership can be transferred to a different account if needed. This moves all associated projects and add-ons to the target account.