After installing your Kubernetes cluster composed by masters and workers, a few configurations steps need to complete. In fact, the join command is not the last operation to perform, in order to have a fully operational cluster.
See how to deploy a k8s cluster using kubeadm here: https://www.dbi-services.com/blog/kubernetes-how-to-install-a-single-master-cluster-with-kubeadm/ .
One of the most important steps in the configuration is the name resolution (DNS) within the k8s cluster. In this blog post, we will see how to properly configure CoreDNS for the entire cluster.

Before beginning, it’s important to know that Kubernetes have 2 DNS versions: Kube-DNS and CoreDNS. Initially, the first versions of Kubernetes started with Kube-DNS and change to CoreDNS since version 1.10. For people who wants to know more about the comparison between both: https://coredns.io/2018/11/27/cluster-dns-coredns-vs-kube-dns/

Pre-requisites:

> You need to have a Kubernetes cluster with kubectl command-line tool configured
> Kubernetes version 1.6 and above
> At least a 3 nodes cluster (1 master and 2 workers)

Once the cluster is initialized and worker nodes have been joined, you can check the status of the nodes and list all pods of the kube-system namespace as follows:

[docker@docker-manager000 ~]$ kubectl get nodes -o wide
NAME                STATUS   ROLES    AGE   VERSION   INTERNAL-IP   EXTERNAL-IP   OS-IMAGE                KERNEL-VERSION               CONTAINER-RUNTIME
docker-manager000   Ready    master   55d   v1.15.3   10.36.0.10    <none>        CentOS Linux 7 (Core)   3.10.0-957.12.2.el7.x86_64   docker://18.9.6
docker-worker000    Ready    <none>   46d   v1.15.3   10.36.0.11    <none>        CentOS Linux 7 (Core)   3.10.0-957.10.1.el7.x86_64   docker://18.9.5
docker-worker001    Ready    <none>   46d   v1.15.3   10.36.0.12    <none>        CentOS Linux 7 (Core)   3.10.0-957.10.1.el7.x86_64   docker://18.9.5

According to the previous command, our cluster is composed of 3 nodes:
> docker-manager000
> docker-worker000
> docker-worker001
which means that pods will be scheduled across all the above hosts. So, each host should be able to resolve the service names with IP addresses. The CoreDNS pods enable this operation and need to be deployed in all hosts.

Let’s check the pod’s deployment in the kube-system namespace:

[docker@docker-manager000 ~]$ kubectl get pods -o wide -n kube-system
NAME                                        READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE   IP              NODE                NOMINATED NODE   READINESS GATES
calico-kube-controllers-65b8787765-894gs    1/1     Running   16         55d   172.20.123.30   docker-manager000              
calico-node-5zhsp                           1/1     Running   6          46d   10.36.0.12      docker-worker001               
calico-node-gq5s9                           1/1     Running   8          46d   10.36.0.11      docker-worker000               
calico-node-pjrfm                           1/1     Running   16         55d   10.36.0.10      docker-manager000              
coredns-686f555694-mdsvd                    1/1     Running   6          35d   172.20.123.26   docker-manager000              
coredns-686f555694-w25wn                    1/1     Running   6          35d   172.20.123.28   docker-manager000              
etcd-docker-manager000                      1/1     Running   16         55d   10.36.0.10      docker-manager000              
kube-apiserver-docker-manager000            1/1     Running   0          13d   10.36.0.10      docker-manager000              
kube-controller-manager-docker-manager000   1/1     Running   46         55d   10.36.0.10      docker-manager000              
kube-proxy-gwkdh                            1/1     Running   7          46d   10.36.0.11      docker-worker000               
kube-proxy-lr5cf                            1/1     Running   6          46d   10.36.0.12      docker-worker001               
kube-proxy-mn7mt                            1/1     Running   16         55d   10.36.0.10      docker-manager000              
kube-scheduler-docker-manager000            1/1     Running   45         55d   10.36.0.10      docker-manager000

In more details, let’s verify the deployment of coredns pods:

[docker@docker-manager000 ~]$ kubectl get pods -o wide -n kube-system | grep coredns

coredns-686f555694-mdsvd                    1/1     Running   6          35d   172.20.123.26   docker-manager000              
coredns-686f555694-w25wn                    1/1     Running   6          35d   172.20.123.28   docker-manager000

Only 2 CoreDNS pods have been deployed within the same host: docker-manager000, our master node. The service name resolution will not work in our cluster for all pods. Let’s verify this supposition…

DNS Resolution test

Create a simple Pod to use for DNS testing:

[docker@docker-manager000 ~]$ cat > test-DNS.yaml << EOF
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: busybox
  namespace: default
spec:
  containers:
  - name: busybox
    image: busybox:1.28
    command:
      - sleep
      - "3600"
    imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
  restartPolicy: Always
EOF

[docker@docker-manager000 ~]$ kubectl apply -f test-DNS.yaml

Verify the status of the Pod previously deployed:

[docker@docker-manager000 ~]$ kubectl get pods -o wide
NAME      READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE   IP              NODE               NOMINATED NODE   READINESS GATES
busybox   1/1     Running   0          13s   172.20.145.19   docker-worker000              

The Pod will be deployed on one of the worker nodes. In our case it’s docker-worker000.

Once the pod is running we can execute a nslookup command in order to verify if the DNS is working or not:

[docker@docker-manager000 ~]$ kubectl exec -it busybox -- nslookup kubernetes.default

Server:    172.21.0.10
Address 1: 172.21.0.10 kube-dns.kube-system.svc.cluster.local

nslookup: can't resolve 'kubernetes.default'

As supposed, the DNS is not working properly. The next steps will be to deploy the CoreDNS pods in all cluster nodes, docker-worker000, and docker-worker001 in our example.

CoreDNS update deployment

The first step is to update the CoreDNS deployment in order to increase the number of replicas, as following:

[docker@docker-manager000 ~]$ kubectl edit deployment coredns -n kube-system
# Please edit the object below. Lines beginning with a '#' will be ignored,
# and an empty file will abort the edit. If an error occurs while saving this file will be
# reopened with the relevant failures.
#
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  annotations:
    deployment.kubernetes.io/revision: "13"
  creationTimestamp: "2019-08-28T07:36:28Z"
  generation: 14
  labels:
    k8s-app: kube-dns
  name: coredns
  namespace: kube-system
  resourceVersion: "6455829"
  selfLink: /apis/extensions/v1beta1/namespaces/kube-system/deployments/coredns
  uid: 3ebfd10f-c58b-43f4-84f1-a9f56dbdffdc
spec:
  progressDeadlineSeconds: 600
  replicas: 3
...

We updated the number of replica from 2 to 3. Then save the changes and wait a few seconds for new CoreDNS pod deployment within the kube-system namespace.

[docker@docker-manager000 ~]$ kubectl get pods -o wide -n kube-system | grep coredns
coredns-686f555694-k4678                    1/1     Running   10         36d   172.20.27.186   docker-worker001               
coredns-686f555694-mdsvd                    1/1     Running   6          36d   172.20.123.26   docker-manager000              
coredns-686f555694-w25wn                    1/1     Running   6          36d   172.20.123.28   docker-manager000              

At this step, the funniest happens because of the Kubernetes scheduler is considering that only 1 CoreDNS pod is needed in addition because 2 pods have been already created before. For this reason, only 1 CoreDNS pod has been deployed in the docker-worker001 randomly.

A workaround is to force update the CoreDNS deployment as follows:

[docker@docker-manager000 ~]$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zlabjp/kubernetes-scripts/master/force-update-deployment 
[docker@docker-manager000 ~]$ chmod +x force-update-deployment
[docker@docker-manager000 ~]$ ./force-update-deployment coredns -n kube-system

Check now the status of the CoreDNS pods:

[docker@docker-manager000 ~]$ kubectl get pods -o wide -n kube-system | grep coredns
coredns-7dc96b7db7-7ndwr                    1/1     Running   0          35s   172.20.145.36   docker-worker000               
coredns-7dc96b7db7-v7wjg                    1/1     Running   0          28s   172.20.123.27   docker-manager000              
coredns-7dc96b7db7-v9qcq                    1/1     Running   0          35s   172.20.27.181   docker-worker001               

The script should redeploy a CoreDNS pod on all hosts.

It may some times that the CoreDNS pods will not be redeployed in all hosts (some times 2 pods in the same host), in such case, execute again the script until 1 CoreDNS pod is deployed on each cluster nodes.

The DNS resolution should now work properly within the entire cluster. Let’s verify it by replaying the DNS resolution test.

Remove and redeploy the busybox deployment as follows:

[docker@docker-manager000 ~]$ kubectl delete -f test-DNS.yaml
pod "busybox" deleted
[docker@docker-manager000 ~]$ kubectl apply -f test-DNS.yaml
pod/busybox created
#Check pod status
[docker@docker-manager000 ~]$ kubectl get pods -o wide
NAME      READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE   IP              NODE               NOMINATED NODE   READINESS GATES
busybox   1/1     Running   0          13s   172.20.145.19   docker-worker000              

Once the pod is running we can execute a nslookup command to confirm that the DNS is properly working:

[docker@docker-manager000 ~]$ kubectl exec -it busybox -- nslookup kubernetes.default

Server:    172.21.0.10
Address 1: 172.21.0.10 kube-dns.kube-system.svc.cluster.local

Name:      kubernetes.default
Address 1: 172.21.0.1 kubernetes.default.svc.cluster.local

Now our internal cluster DNS is working well 🙂 !!


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