1 Overview of Kubernetes Engine

Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Kubernetes Engine (OKE) is a scalable, highly available service that can be used to deploy any containerized application to the cloud.

The OKE service uses Cluster API Provider (CAPI) and Cluster API Provider for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (CAPOCI) to orchestrate the cluster on the Private Cloud Appliance.

The OKE service uses Kubernetes, the open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across clusters of hosts. Kubernetes groups the containers that make up an application into logical units called pods for easy management.

For more information about Kubernetes in Oracle, see What Is Kubernetes? For more general information about Kubernetes, see the Kubernetes site.

Using the OKE Service

You can access the OKE service to create OKE clusters by using the Compute Web UI, the OCI CLI, and API. For general information about using the Private Cloud Appliance Compute Web UI and OCI CLI, see the Working in the Compute Enclave chapter in the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance User Guide.

You can access OKE clusters by using the Kubernetes command line (kubectl), the Kubernetes Dashboard, and the Kubernetes API.

On Private Cloud Appliance, the OKE service manages all OKE cluster nodes, which are compute instances. An authorized user can perform tasks such as patch the instance.

Supported Versions of Kubernetes

The OKE service uses versions of Kubernetes that are certified as conformant by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The OKE service is itself ISO-compliant (ISO-IEC 27001, 27017, 27018).

Supported versions of Kubernetes are 1.30.3, 1.29.9, and 1.28.8.

Best practice is to keep your clusters upgraded so that they are always running versions of Kubernetes that are currently supported by OKE. Viewing a cluster tells you if a newer Kubernetes version is available for that cluster. See Updating an OKE Cluster.

Supported Versions of the OCI Terraform Provider

This guide provides example Terraform scripts to configure the network resources. To use these scripts, you must install both Terraform and the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Terraform provider.

In your provider block, specify the version of the OCI Terraform provider to install as at least v4.50.0 but no greater than v6.36.0:

provider "oci" {
    version          = ">= 4.50.0, <= 6.36.0"
...
}

OKE Service Limits

The following table shows the service limits for the OKE service on Private Cloud Appliance.

Service Limit

Maximum number of clusters per tenancy

10

Maximum number of worker nodes (compute instances) per cluster. These nodes can be distributed across multiple node pools.

128

Maximum number of nodes per node pool/group

128

Maximum number of node pools/groups per cluster

No limit on number of node pools as long as total nodes per cluster does not exceed 128.

Maximum number of pods per node

110. This is the Kubernetes default.