The EWC Managed Kubernetes Service is a central component of the European Weather Cloud (EWC), providing users with a reliable way to create and manage Kubernetes clusters.
On the ECMWF side, the service is built on Magnum, the OpenStack service that exposes container orchestration engines (COEs)—such as Kubernetes—as native OpenStack resources.
Magnum integrates with the wider OpenStack ecosystem and handles the full life cycle of Kubernetes clusters running on the cloud.
This section introduces the key concepts and components of the system.
ClusterTemplate
A ClusterTemplate defines how a Kubernetes cluster should be built, including the configuration of both control plane and worker nodes.
ECMWF maintains a set of predefined templates that users can select when creating new Kubernetes clusters.
Cluster
A cluster is a Kubernetes deployment created by the Magnum service from a selected ClusterTemplate.
The template provides the configuration parameters—together with Kubernetes COE–specific options—that the Magnum service uses to instruct the Kubernetes COE driver to provision the required infrastructure, such as virtual machines, networking, and storage.
Once these resources are created and configured, the resulting cluster is a fully operational Kubernetes system capable of running containerized workloads.
All cluster resources, including control plane and worker nodes, are deployed into the user’s OpenStack project within the EWC tenancy.
LifeCycle
Magnum provides a set of life-cycle operations for managing Kubernetes clusters on OpenStack.
Users can interact with the Magnum service to create, update, and delete their clusters as needed.
Magnum Python Command-line Client
The python-magnumclient command-line tool provides access to the Magnum API and allows users to manage the full life cycle of their Kubernetes clusters directly from the OpenStack command line.