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Antrea Versioning

Table of Contents

Versioning scheme

Antrea versions are expressed as x.y.z, where x is the major version, y is the minor version, and z is the patch version, following Semantic Versioning terminology.

Minor releases and patch releases

Unlike minor releases, patch releases should not contain miscellaneous feature additions or improvements. No incompatibilities should ever be introduced between patch versions of the same minor version. API groups / versions must not be introduced or removed as part of patch releases.

Patch releases are intended for important bug fixes to recent minor versions, such as addressing security vulnerabilities, fixes to problems preventing Antrea from being deployed & used successfully by a significant number of users, severe problems with no workaround, and blockers for products (including commercial products) which rely on Antrea.

When it comes to dependencies, the following rules are observed between patch versions of the same Antrea minor versions:

  • the same minor OVS version should be used
  • the same minor version should be used for all Go dependencies, unless updating to a new minor / major version is required for an important bug fix
  • for Antrea Docker images shipped as part of a patch release, the same version must be used for the base Operating System (Linux distribution / Windows server), unless an update is required to fix a critical bug. If important updates are available for a given Operating System version (e.g. which address security vulnerabilities), they should be included in Antrea patch releases.

Feature stability

For every Antrea minor release, the stability level of supported features may be updated (from Alpha to Beta or from Beta to GA). Refer to the the CHANGELOG for information about feature stability level for each release. For features controlled by a feature gate, this information is also present in a more structured way in feature-gates.md.

Release cycle

New Antrea minor releases are currently shipped every 6 to 8 weeks. This fast release cadence enables us to ship new features quickly and frequently. It may change in the future. Compared to deploying the top-of-tree of the Antrea main branch, using a released version should provide more stability guarantees:

  • despite our CI pipelines, some bugs can sneak into the branch and be fixed shortly after
  • merge conflicts can break the top-of-tree temporarily
  • some CI jobs are run periodically and not for every pull request before merge; as much as possible we run the entire test suite for each release candidate

Antrea maintains release branches for the two most recent minor releases (e.g. the release-0.10 and release-0.11 branches are maintained until Antrea 0.12 is released). As part of this maintenance process, patch versions are released as frequently as needed, following these guidelines. With the current release cadence, this means that each minor release receives approximately 3 months of patch support. This may seem short, but was done on purpose to encourage users to upgrade Antrea often and avoid potential incompatibility issues. In the future, we may reduce our release cadence for minor releases and simultaneously increase the support window for each release.

Antrea upgrade and supported version skew

Our goal is to support “graceful” upgrades for Antrea. By “graceful”, we notably mean that there should be no significant disruption to data-plane connectivity nor to policy enforcement, beyond the necessary disruption incurred by the restart of individual components:

  • during the Antrea Controller restart, new policies will not be processed. Because the Controller also runs the validation webhook for Antrea-native policies, an attempt to create an Antrea-native policy resource before the restart is complete may return an error.
  • during an Antrea Agent restart, the Node’s data-plane will be impacted: new connections to & from the Node will not be possible, and existing connections may break.

In particular, it should be possible to upgrade Antrea without compromising enforcement of existing network policies for both new and existing Pods.

In order to achieve this, the different Antrea components need to support version skew.

  • Antrea Controller: must be upgraded first
  • Antrea Agent: must not be newer than the Antrea Controller, and may be up to 4 minor versions older
  • Antctl: must not be newer than the Antrea Controller, and may be up to 4 minor versions older

The supported version skew means that we only recommend Antrea upgrades to a new release up to 4 minor versions newer. For example, a cluster using 0.10 can be upgraded to one of 0.11, 0.12, 0.13 or 0.14, but we discourage direct upgrades to 0.15 and beyond. With the current release cadence, this provides a 6-month window of compatibility. If we reduce our release cadence in the future, we may revisit this policy as well.

When directly applying a newer Antrea YAML manifest, as provided for each release, there is no guarantee that the Antrea Controller will be upgraded first. In practice, the Controller would be upgraded simultaneously with the first Agent(s) to be upgraded by the rolling update of the Agent DaemonSet. This may create some transient issues and compromise the “graceful” upgrade. For upgrade scenarios, we therefore recommend that you “split-up” the manifest to ensure that the Controller is upgraded first.

Supported K8s versions

Each Antrea minor release should support maintained K8s releases at the time of release (3 up to K8s 1.19, 4 after that). For example, at the time that Antrea 0.10 was released, the latest K8s version was 1.19; as a result we guarantee that 0.10 supports at least 1.19, 1.18 and 1.17 (in practice it also supports K8s 1.16).

In addition, we strive to support the K8s versions used by default in cloud-managed K8s services ( EKS, AKS and GKE regular channel).

Deprecation policies

Prometheus metrics deprecation policy

Antrea follows a similar policy as Kubernetes for metrics deprecation.

Alpha metrics have no stability guarantees; as such they can be modified or deleted at any time.

Stable metrics are guaranteed to not change; specifically, stability means:

  • the metric itself will not be renamed
  • the type of metric will not be modified

Eventually, even a stable metric can be deleted. In this case, the metric must be marked as deprecated first and the metric must stay deprecated for at least one minor release. The CHANGELOG must announce both metric deprecations and metric deletions.

Before deprecation:

# HELP some_counter this counts things
# TYPE some_counter counter
some_counter 0

After deprecation:

# HELP some_counter (Deprecated since 0.10.0) this counts things
# TYPE some_counter counter
some_counter 0

In the future, we may introduce the same concept of hidden metric as K8s, as an additional part of the metric lifecycle.

APIs deprecation policy

The Antrea APIs are built using K8s (they are a combination of CustomResourceDefinitions and aggregation layer APIServices) and we follow the same versioning scheme as the K8s APIs and the same deprecation policy.

Other than the most recent API versions in each track, older API versions must be supported after their announced deprecation for a duration of no less than:

  • GA: 12 months
  • Beta: 9 months
  • Alpha: N/A (can be removed immediately)

This also applies to the controlplane API. In particular, introduction and removal of new versions for this API must respect the “graceful” upgrade guarantee. The controlplane API (which is exposed using the aggregation layer) is often referred to as an “internal” API as it is used by the Antrea components to communicate with each other, and is usually not consumed by end users, e.g. cluster admins. However, this API may also be used for integration with other software, which is why we abide to the same deprecation policy as for other more “user-facing” APIs (e.g. Antrea-native policy CRDs).

K8s has a moratorium on the removal of API object versions that have been persisted to storage. At the moment, none of Antrea APIServices (which use the aggregation layer) persist objects to storage. So the only objects we need to worry about are CustomResources, which are persisted by the K8s apiserver. For them, we adopt the following rules:

  • Alpha API versions may be removed at any time.
  • The deprecated field must be used for CRDs to indicate that a particular version of the resource has been deprecated.
  • Beta and GA API versions must be supported after deprecation for the respective durations stipulated above before they can be removed.
  • For deprecated Beta and GA API versions, a conversion webhook must be provided along with each Antrea release, until the API version is removed altogether.

Introducing new API resources

Introducing new CRDs

Starting with Antrea v1.0, all Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) for Antrea are defined in the same API group, crd.antrea.io, and all CRDs in this group are versioned individually. For example, at the time of writing this (v1.3 release timeframe), the Antrea CRDs include:

  • ClusterGroup in crd.antrea.io/v1alpha2
  • ClusterGroup in crd.antrea.io/v1alpha3
  • Egress in crd.antrea.io/v1alpha2
  • etc.

Notice how 2 versions of ClusterGroup are supported: the one in crd.antrea.io/v1alpha2 was introduced in v1.0, and is being deprecated as it was replaced by the one in crd.antrea.io/v1alpha3, introduced in v1.1.

When introducing a new version of a CRD, the API deprecation policy should be followed.

When introducing a CRD, the following rule should be followed in order to avoid potential dependency cycles (and thus import cycles in Go): if the CRD depends on other object types spread across potentially different versions of crd.antrea.io, the CRD should be defined in a group version greater or equal to all of these versions. For example, if we want to introduce a new CRD which depends on types v1alpha1.X and v1alpha2.Y, it needs to go into v1alpha2 or a more recent version of crd.antrea.io. As a rule it should probably go into v1alpha2 unless it is closely related to other CRDs in a later version, in which case it can be defined alongside these CRDs, in order to avoid user confusion.

If a new CRD does not have dependencies and is not closely related to an existing CRD, it will typically be defined in v1alpha1. In some rare cases, a CRD can be defined in v1beta1 directly if there is enough confidence in the stability of the API.

Upgrading from Antrea v1 to Antrea v2

Required upgrade steps because of API removal

Several CRD API Alpha versions were removed as part of the major version bump to Antrea v2, following the introduction of Beta versions in earlier minor releases. For more details, refer to this list. Because of these CRD version removals, you will need to make sure that you upgrade your existing CRs (for the affected CRDs) to the new (storage) version, before trying to upgrade to Antrea v2.0. You will also need to ensure that the status.storedVersions field for the affected CRDs is patched, with the old versions being removed. To simplify your upgrade process, we provide an antctl command which will automatically handle these steps for you: antctl upgrade api-storage.

There are 3 possible scenarios:

  1. You never installed an Antrea minor version older than v1.13 in your cluster. In this case you can directly upgrade to Antrea v2.0.
  2. Your cluster is currently running Antrea v1.13 through v1.15 (included), but you previously ran an Antrea minor version older than v1.13. In this case, you will need to run antctl upgrade api-storage prior to upgrading to Antrea v2.0, regardless of whether you have created Antrea CRs or not.
  3. Your cluster is currently running an Antrea minor version older than v1.13. In this case, you will first need to upgrade to Antrea v1.15.1, then run antctl upgrade api-storage, before being able to upgrade to Antrea v2.0.

Even for scenario 1, feel free to run antctl upgrade api-storage. It is not strictly required, but it will not cause any harm either.

In the sub-sections below, we give some detailed instructions for upgrade, based on your current Antrea version and installation method.

For more information about CRD versioning, refer to the K8s documentation. The antctl upgrade api-storage command aims at automating that process for our users.

Case 1: upgrading from Antrea v1.13-v1.15 with kubectl

# Download antctl from release assets. You can use the antctl version that
# matches your current Antrea version.
$ antctl version
antctlVersion: v1.13.4
controllerVersion: v1.13.4

# Even if you didn't create any CR using the CRD API versions which have been
# removed in Antrea v2.0, you will still need to run the antctl command, or the
# upgrade will fail.

# Upgrade API storage for all CRDs.
# For usage information run: antctl upgrade api-storage --help
# In particular, the script will upgrade the system Tier CRs managed by Antrea
# to the new storage version (v1beta1) if needed. If you never installed a minor
# version of Antrea older than v1.13 in your cluster, you may not see any CRD
# upgrade.
$ antctl upgrade api-storage
Skip upgrading CRD "externalnodes.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "trafficcontrols.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "externalentities.crd.antrea.io" since all stored objects are in the storage version.
Skip upgrading CRD "supportbundlecollections.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "antreaagentinfos.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "ippools.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "antreacontrollerinfos.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Upgrading 6 objects of CRD "tiers.crd.antrea.io".
Successfully upgraded 6 objects of CRD "tiers.crd.antrea.io".

# You can now upgrade to Antrea v2.0 successfully.
$ kubectl apply -f https://github.com/antrea-io/antrea/releases/download/v2.0.0/antrea.yml

Case 2: upgrading from Antrea v1.13-v1.15 with Helm

# Download antctl from release assets. You can use the antctl version that
# matches your current Antrea version.
$ antctl version
antctlVersion: v1.13.4
controllerVersion: v1.13.4

# Even if you didn't create any CR using the CRD API versions which have been
# removed in Antrea v2.0, you will still need to run the antctl command, or the
# upgrade will fail.

# Upgrade API storage for all CRDs.
# For usage information run: antctl upgrade api-storage --help
# In particular, the script will upgrade the system Tier CRs managed by Antrea
# to the new storage version (v1beta1) if needed. If you never installed a minor
# version of Antrea older than v1.13 in your cluster, you may not see any CRD
# upgrade.
$ antctl upgrade api-storage
Skip upgrading CRD "externalnodes.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "trafficcontrols.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "externalentities.crd.antrea.io" since all stored objects are in the storage version.
Skip upgrading CRD "supportbundlecollections.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "antreaagentinfos.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "ippools.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "antreacontrollerinfos.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Upgrading 6 objects of CRD "tiers.crd.antrea.io".
Successfully upgraded 6 objects of CRD "tiers.crd.antrea.io".

# You can now upgrade to Antrea v2.0 successfully, starting with CRDs.
$ kubectl apply -f https://github.com/antrea-io/antrea/releases/download/v2.0.0/antrea-crds.yml
$ helm upgrade antrea antrea/antrea --namespace kube-system --version 2.0.0

Case 3: upgrading from Antrea v1.12 (or older) with kubectl

# Start by upgrading to Antrea v1.15.1.
$ kubectl apply -f https://github.com/antrea-io/antrea/releases/download/v1.15.1/antrea.yml

# Download antctl from the v1.15.1 release assets.
$ antctl version
antctlVersion: v1.15.1
controllerVersion: v1.15.1

# Upgrade API storage for all CRDs.
# For usage information run: antctl upgrade api-storage --help
# In particular, the script will upgrade the system Tier CRs managed by Antrea
# to the new storage version (v1beta1).
$ antctl upgrade api-storage
Skip upgrading CRD "externalnodes.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "trafficcontrols.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "externalentities.crd.antrea.io" since all stored objects are in the storage version.
Skip upgrading CRD "supportbundlecollections.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "antreaagentinfos.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "ippools.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "antreacontrollerinfos.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Upgrading 6 objects of CRD "tiers.crd.antrea.io".
Successfully upgraded 6 objects of CRD "tiers.crd.antrea.io".

# You can now upgrade to Antrea v2.0 successfully.
$ kubectl apply -f https://github.com/antrea-io/antrea/releases/download/v2.0.0/antrea.yml

Case 4: upgrading from Antrea v1.12 (or older) with Helm

# Start by upgrading to Antrea v1.15.1, starting with CRDs.
$ kubectl apply -f https://github.com/antrea-io/antrea/releases/download/v1.15.1/antrea-crds.yml
$ helm upgrade antrea antrea/antrea --namespace kube-system --version 1.15.1

# Download antctl from the v1.15.1 release assets.
$ antctl version
antctlVersion: v1.15.1
controllerVersion: v1.15.1

# Upgrade API storage for all CRDs.
# For usage information run: antctl upgrade api-storage --help
# In particular, the script will upgrade the system Tier CRs managed by Antrea
# to the new storage version (v1beta1).
$ antctl upgrade api-storage
Skip upgrading CRD "externalnodes.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "trafficcontrols.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "externalentities.crd.antrea.io" since all stored objects are in the storage version.
Skip upgrading CRD "supportbundlecollections.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "antreaagentinfos.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "ippools.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Skip upgrading CRD "antreacontrollerinfos.crd.antrea.io" since it only has one version.
Upgrading 6 objects of CRD "tiers.crd.antrea.io".
Successfully upgraded 6 objects of CRD "tiers.crd.antrea.io".

# You can now upgrade to Antrea v2.0 successfully, starting with CRDs.
$ kubectl apply -f https://github.com/antrea-io/antrea/releases/download/v2.0.0/antrea-crds.yml
$ helm upgrade antrea antrea/antrea --namespace kube-system --version 2.0.0

Other upgrade considerations

Some deprecated options have been removed from the Antrea configuration:

  • nplPortRange has been removed from the Agent configuration, use nodePortLocal.portRange instead.
  • enableIPSecTunnel has been removed from the Agent configuration, use trafficEncryptionMode instead.
  • multicastInterfaces has been removed from the Agent configuration, use multicast.multicastInterfaces instead.
  • multicluster.enable has been removed from the Agent configuration, as the Multicluster functionality is no longer gated by a boolean parameter.
  • legacyCRDMirroring has been removed from the Controller configuration, as it dates back to the v1 major version bump, and it has been ignored for years.

If you are porting your old Antrea configuration to Antrea v2, please make sure that you are no longer using these parameters. Unknown parameters will be ignored by Antrea, and the behavior may not be what you expect.

Getting Started

To help you get started, see the documentation.

Documentation