Experimental Features

CAPO now ships with experimental features the users can enable.

Currently CAPO has the following experimental features:

Enabling Experimental Features for Management Clusters Started with clusterctl

Users can enable/disable features by setting OS environment variables before running clusterctl init, e.g.:

export EXP_SOME_FEATURE_NAME=true

clusterctl init --infrastructure openstack

As an alternative to environment variables, it is also possible to set variables in the clusterctl config file located at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/cluster-api/clusterctl.yaml, e.g.:

# Values for environment variable substitution
EXP_SOME_FEATURE_NAME: "true"

In case a variable is defined in both the config file and as an OS environment variable, the environment variable takes precedence. For more information on how to set variables for clusterctl, see clusterctl Configuration File

Enabling Experimental Features on Existing Management Clusters

To enable/disable features on existing management clusters, users can edit the controller manager deployments, which will then trigger a restart with the requested features. E.g:

kubectl edit -n capo-system deployment.apps/capo-controller-manager

// Enable/disable available features by modifying Args below.
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - args:
        - --leader-elect
        - --feature-gates=SomeFeature=true,OtherFeature=false

Similarly, to validate if a particular feature is enabled, see the arguments by issuing:

kubectl describe -n capo-system deployment.apps/capo-controller-manager

Enabling Experimental Features for e2e Tests

Features can be enabled by setting them as environmental variables before running e2e tests.

For ci this can also be done through updating ./test/e2e/data/e2e_conf.yaml.

Enabling Experimental Features on Tilt

On development environments started with Tilt, features can be enabled by setting the feature variables in kustomize_substitutions, e.g.:

kustomize_substitutions:
  EXP_CAPO_PRIORITY_QUEUE: 'true'

For more details on setting up a development environment with tilt, see Developing with Tilt