Deployment with NFD Operator

Table of contents

1. Deployment
2. Uninstallation

The Node Feature Discovery Operator automates installation, configuration and updates of NFD using a specific NodeFeatureDiscovery custom resource. This also provides good support for managing NFD as a dependency of other operators.

Deployment

Deployment using the Node Feature Discovery Operator is recommended to be done via operatorhub.io.

NOTE: The latest NFD Operator release on operatorhub.io (v0.6.0, 2023) does not work with current NFD versions. It starts nfd-worker with the -server flag (removed in NFD v0.17), probes nfd-master with grpc_health_probe (not shipped since NFD v0.15), and does not install the nfd.k8s-sigs.io NodeFeature CRDs or RBAC that current NFD requires. Its own deployment also references the sidecar image gcr.io/kubebuilder/kube-rbac-proxy:v0.8.0, which is no longer available, so the operator pod never becomes ready. Until a new operator release is published, deploy NFD with Helm or Kustomize. With the v0.6.0 operator, set spec.operand.image to an NFD release it supports, e.g. registry.k8s.io/nfd/node-feature-discovery:v0.12.1-minimal.

1. You need to have OLM installed. If you don't, take a look at the latest release for detailed instructions.

2. Install the operator:

   kubectl create -f https://operatorhub.io/install/nfd-operator.yaml
   

3. Create NodeFeatureDiscovery object (in nfd namespace here):

   cat << EOF | kubectl apply -f -
   apiVersion: v1
   kind: Namespace
   metadata:
     name: nfd
   ---
   apiVersion: nfd.kubernetes.io/v1
   kind: NodeFeatureDiscovery
   metadata:
     name: my-nfd-deployment
     namespace: nfd
   spec:
     operand:
       image: gcr.io/k8s-staging-nfd/node-feature-discovery:master
       imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
   EOF
   

Uninstallation

If you followed the deployment instructions above you can uninstall NFD with:

kubectl -n nfd delete NodeFeatureDiscovery my-nfd-deployment

Optionally, you can also remove the namespace:

kubectl delete ns nfd

See the node-feature-discovery-operator and OLM project documentation for instructions for uninstalling the operator and operator lifecycle manager, respectively.