Chapter 7. High availability on OpenShift Serverless
High availability (HA) is a standard feature of Kubernetes APIs that helps to ensure that APIs stay operational if a disruption occurs. In an HA deployment, if an active controller crashes or is deleted, another controller is available to take over processing of the APIs that were being serviced by the controller that is now unavailable.
HA in OpenShift Serverless is available through leader election, which is enabled by default after the Knative Serving control plane is installed.
When using a leader election HA pattern, instances of controllers are already scheduled and running inside the cluster before they are required. These controller instances compete to use a shared resource, known as the leader election lock. The instance of the controller that has access to the leader election lock resource at any given time is referred to as the leader.
7.1. Configuring high availability replicas on OpenShift Serverless
High availability (HA) functionality is available by default on OpenShift Serverless for the autoscaler-hpa, controller, activator, kourier-control, and kourier-gateway controllers. These controllers are configured with two replicas by default.
You can modify the number of replicas that are created per controller by changing the configuration of the KnativeServing.spec.highAvailability spec in the KnativeServing custom resource definition (CRD).
Prerequisites
- You have access to an OpenShift Container Platform account with cluster administrator access.
- You have installed the OpenShift Serverless Operator and Knative Serving.
- You have access to the OpenShift Container Platform web console and have logged in.
Procedure
In the web console Administrator perspective, navigate to OperatorHub
Installed Operators. 
-
Select the
knative-servingnamespace. Click Knative Serving in the list of Provided APIs for the OpenShift Serverless Operator to go to the Knative Serving tab.
Click knative-serving, then go to the YAML tab in the knative-serving page.
Edit the CRD YAML:
Example YAML
apiVersion: operator.knative.dev/v1alpha1 kind: KnativeServing metadata: name: knative-serving namespace: knative-serving spec: high-availability: replicas: 3ImportantDo not modify any YAML contained inside the
configfield. Some of the configuration values in this field are injected by the OpenShift Serverless Operator, and modifying them will cause your deployment to become unsupported.-
The default
replicasvalue is2. -
Changing the value to
1disables HA, or you can increase the number of replicas as required. The example configuration shown specifies a replica count of3for all HA controllers.
-
The default
