kubernetes-sigs/kubespray

Develop a custom ansible strategy plugin to perform graceful upgrade in a true rolling fashion

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#12929 opened on Jan 29, 2026

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help wantedkind/featurelifecycle/frozen

Description

What would you like to be added

Basically: https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.general/issues/10920

(Upstreaming the strategy into community.general would also work)

Once we switch to collection only (#12227 ) we'll be able to handle ansible plugins more easily.

WARNING: This is not an easy task, and requires to dive deep into Ansible internals and do a fair bit of Python. This not at all a "good first issue"

Why is this needed

There is 2 purpose for this strategy:

  • faster cluster upgrade, because there is no longer a "all nodes in a batch wait for all other nodes" bottleneck.
  • make possible cluster upgrades with bigger "batch size" (currently, a PodDisruptionBudbget can block your upgrade if enoug eligible nodes for a deployment are in the same batch. With that scenario, some of the nodes where the eviction succeded would finish instead of waiting of the rest of the batch, allowing pods to be scheduled on them and the other node drain to succeed).

/lifecycle frozen /help

Contributor guide

Tech stack
python
Domain
devopsinfrastructure
Issue type
feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
5
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
over 1 week
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
fresh
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
mostly clear
Prerequisites
PythonAnsible internalsRolling update strategiesKubernetes
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
15
Research direction
Start by studying the Ansible strategy plugin architecture in the kubespray repository. Examine the existing rolling update logic and the referenced issue #10920 in community.general. Understand how PodDisruptionBudgets interact with node draining. Then design a custom strategy plugin that uses incremental node selection and parallel draining.