Maintenance Window

All Managed Kubernetes resources, such as clusters and node pools, are subject to an automated weekly maintenance process. All changes to a cluster or node pools that may cause service interruption, such as upgrades, are executed during maintenance. During the maintenance window, you may encounter uncontrolled disconnections and an inability to connect to the cluster.

The upgrade process during maintenance respects the selected Kubernetes version of the cluster. The upgrade process does not upgrade to another Kubernetes major, minor, or patch version unless the current cluster or node pool version reaches its end of life. In such instances, the cluster or node pool will be updated to the next minor version that is active.

Maintenance window configuration

The maintenance window consists of two parts. The first part specifies the day of the week, while the second part specifies the expected time. The following example shows a maintenance window configuration:

"maintenanceWindow": {
      "time": "15:39:01",
      "dayOfTheWeek": "Friday"
    },

For more information, see Create a Cluster.

Cluster maintenance

During cluster maintenance, control plane components are upgraded to the newest version available.

Node pool maintenance

During the maintenance of a particular node pool, all nodes of this pool will be replaced by new nodes. Nodes are replaced one after the other, starting with the oldest node. During the node replacement, first, a new node is created and added to the cluster. Then, the old node is drained and removed from the cluster. Node pool upgrade considers the four-hour maintenance window. The upgrade process will be continued in the next node pool maintenance if it fails to upgrade all nodes of the node pool within the four-hour maintenance window.

Node drain and PodDisruptionBudgets (PDBs)

The maintenance process first tries to drain a node gracefully, considering the given PDBs for one hour. If this fails, the node is drained, ignoring pod disruption budgets.