Documentation issue with using ignition as a bootstrap configuration

[odvarkadaniel]

What steps did you take and what happened?

I was following this part of the CAPI book to use ignition as a bootstrap config for my control plane machine for a workload cluster, but I run in to an issue where the AMI with the name capa-ami-flatcar-stable-?1.22.2-* does not exist.

The clusterctl command that is being used to generate the workload cluster is using unsupported version for this feature:

clusterctl generate cluster ignition-cluster \
    --from https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api-provider-aws/blob/main/templates/cluster-template-flatcar.yaml \
    --kubernetes-version **v1.22.2** \
    --worker-machine-count 2 \
    > ignition-cluster.yaml

The kubernetes version should be v1.25.0+.

What did you expect to happen?

I expected my control plane machine to get to phase Running.

Cluster API version

v1.5.0

Kubernetes version

No response

Anything else you would like to add?

Not really a bug, but an error in the documentation as the AMI exists only for versions v1.25.0+ according to this list.

Label(s) to be applied

/label area/documentation

[k8s-ci-robot]

@odvarkadaniel: The label(s) /label area/documentation cannot be applied. These labels are supported: api-review, tide/merge-method-merge, tide/merge-method-rebase, tide/merge-method-squash, team/katacoda, refactor. Is this label configured under labels -> additional_labels or labels -> restricted_labels in plugin.yaml?

In response to this:

What steps did you take and what happened?

I was following this part of the CAPI book to use ignition as a bootstrap config for my control plane machine for a workload cluster, but I run in to an issue where the AMI with the name capa-ami-flatcar-stable-?1.22.2-* does not exist.

The clusterctl command that is being used to generate the workload cluster is using unsupported version for this feature:

clusterctl generate cluster ignition-cluster \
   --from https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api-provider-aws/blob/main/templates/cluster-template-flatcar.yaml \
   --kubernetes-version **v1.22.2** \
   --worker-machine-count 2 \
   > ignition-cluster.yaml

The kubernetes version should be v1.25.0+.

What did you expect to happen?

I expected my control plane machine to get to phase Running.

Cluster API version

v1.5.0

Kubernetes version

No response

Anything else you would like to add?

Not really a bug, but an error in the documentation as the AMI exists only for versions v1.25.0+ according to this list.

Label(s) to be applied

/kind bug
/label area/documentation

Instructions for interacting with me using PR comments are available here. If you have questions or suggestions related to my behavior, please file an issue against the kubernetes/test-infra repository.

[odvarkadaniel]

/area documentation
/area clusterctl

[killianmuldoon]

/triage accepted

Thanks for reporting this!

/help

[k8s-ci-robot]

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In response to this:

/triage accepted

Thanks for reporting this!

/help

Instructions for interacting with me using PR comments are available here. If you have questions or suggestions related to my behavior, please file an issue against the kubernetes/test-infra repository.

[mdbooth]

ping @tormath1

[odvarkadaniel]

Would an acceptable solution to this be a change of the k8s version in the commend to v1.25.0 and some kind of note saying that ignition is supported in 1.25+, @killianmuldoon?
If so, I could just take this.

[invidian]

How about we bump it to 1.28.1 already, since I guess they will be removed later in the future than v1.25.0? I'm pretty sure v1.22.2 existed at some point, so I assume those AMIs are now removed due to being EOL.

[tormath1]

Thanks for raising this issue. I think the version should be the same as the one in the "getting started" common book: https://cluster-api-aws.sigs.k8s.io/getting-started#generating-the-cluster-configuration. We can update 1.22.2 to 1.28.0 but we will have the same issue in a few months / years.
As the --kubernetes-version from the documentation seems to still target the latest stable, what about something like that:

clusterctl generate cluster ignition-cluster \
    --from https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api-provider-aws/blob/main/templates/cluster-template-flatcar.yaml \
-    --kubernetes-version **v1.22.2** \
+    --kubernetes-version $(curl -Ls https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable.txt) \
    --worker-machine-count 2 \
    > ignition-cluster.yaml

[ahrkrak]

genius. more docs should do this.

[killianmuldoon]

Is there any guarantee that an image exists for every stable version of Kubernetes?

We may also not have support for a given minor version in Kubernetes - it can take time to catch up and older release branches which will have this documentation will certainly not support the latest version of Kubernetes.

I think if we want to keep this documentation from being broken the target should be keeping this version the same as the version used by the regular CAPI quickstart, but we'd need some guarantee that those AMIs will be available.

[odvarkadaniel]

I guess every major stable version should be guaranteed to have an AMI? So therefore we could just modify the command that @tormath1 posted above as:

clusterctl generate cluster ignition-cluster \
    --from https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api-provider-aws/blob/main/templates/cluster-template-flatcar.yaml \
-    --kubernetes-version **v1.22.2** \
+    --kubernetes-version $(curl -Ls https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable.txt | awk -F. '{$NF=0}1' OFS=.) \
    --worker-machine-count 2 \
    > ignition-cluster.yaml

So we always end up with a major version of k8s.

[odvarkadaniel]

/assign