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Kubernetes - AddOns

There's no native Kubernetes object named AddOn, tough some distributions may have an AddOn CR (or a similar name) to manage the lifecycle of the AddOns.

A K8s AddOn is basically anything that runs on top of K8s but not user workloads ("Add-ons extend the functionality of Kubernetes.") Many of the CNCF projects can be considered as k8s addons, like Cilium, CoreDNS, KubeVirt. Addons exist in the form of Service, Deployment, Daemonset, Pod, etc.

AddOns to extend functionality

  • AddOn management itself can be an AddOn.
  • Cluster Management (baremetal / VM): kubevirt, metal3
  • Networking / Service Mesh: cilium, istio
  • Storage: Rook/Ceph, NetApp
  • IAM
  • Policy / gatekeeper
  • Observability: logging / audit logging /dashboard
  • cert-manager
  • Registry: harbor
  • DR
  • Databases
  • NTP
  • Backup