Create a cluster

Prerequisites

An important prerequisite to creating a cluster is to create at least one domain to use with your clusters. See Manage domains. If you do not want to create a custom domain with your own DNS, you can always generate a shared namespace under our customer-shared domain name. See Using a Release-generated domain for more details.

Generally, the prerequisites for creating a cluster in AWS and GCP are low, but we will identify key items in a warning box like this. Pay attention to these warnings and see if they apply to you.

Create a new cluster

To create a cluster, navigate to your account settings and then to the Clusters tab. Press Create new cluster and select the existing cloud integration that you want to create the cluster in. Choose a region, an IP range, the Kubernetes version, and domain to use with this cluster. You can change the cluster name or leave the autogenerated one.

If you are using AWS and want to deploy this new cluster into an existing VPC, please see Using an Existing AWS VPC.

Click Clusters in the sidebar, then click the green Create New Cluster button in the "Clusters" section. Note that only account owners may create new clusters.

This will spin up a new Kubernetes cluster in your cloud provider (for example, using EKS if you've integrated with AWS). Note that this will create compute resources in your cloud provider account, which you will be billed for.

Choosing an IP range or CIDR block

If you're not sure which IP range to use, you can choose any one from the dropdown.

If you are using an existing VPC and networking layout, the CIDR block will be in use or might not be available in the dropdown. If you know what you are doing, type the existing CIDR block range into the field to override the Release suggestions.

Release environments run inside your cloud provider account, and these might need to connect to existing services and applications that run there. Conversely, you might need to fully isolate your Release environments from existing services.

To keep Release environments from interfering with existing applications, by default, Release selects a network address or CIDR block that is distinct from the other network addresses you use in your enterprise. If you know which CIDR block to use, go ahead and select that. Release will build a virtual private cloud (VPC) with the unique CIDR block you provide.

Managing your cluster and node groups

After creating your cluster, you'll automatically have a default node group. If you want to reduce costs (for example, if you're still experimenting with Release), you can set the minimum, maximum, and desired node size to 1 (or even 0).

From the cluster settings page, you can also upgrade the cluster, set it as default, or add more node groups.

Choosing a node group size and type

Note that you can set a minimum and maximum number of nodes and the type of node that your cloud provider will use to host the workloads.

The size of cluster you need will depend on your application stack, use case, and team size. Unless you know for sure how many environments you will be running at once and what each workload will be, the best option is to choose the defaults (min: 3, max: 10, type: 16GiB/4 CPUs).

With Release, you can seamlessly upgrade, increase, decrease, or resize your cluster later without any interruption, so you can always change this later if you need more compute power or want to reduce your cloud bill.

In both AWS and GCP, there may be resource limits and quotas that apply. If you are using a new account or project dedicated specifically to Release, you may not need to adjust the defaults. However, if you are sharing resources in an existing account or project, you may run into an issue and receive an error message that hopefully sheds light on the problem. You will need to adjust or correct any problems before continuing. We will gladly help you, so feel free to reach out to your support contact for help.

Using a Release-generated domain

You can choose to use a Release-generated domain by selecting "Generate a Release Subdomain" when you create a cluster. This will generate a subdomain under one of our domains that will be used for the URLs generated for your environments.

Creating a cluster with elevated permissions

By default, clusters are created with no extra permissions or roles. If you require elevated permissions on your cluster, you can turn on the "Use elevated permissions when clusters are created" setting on your Organization Settings page.

When this setting is on, any new clusters will be created with the AdministratorAccess role attached.

Migrating apps to a new cluster

When creating a new cluster, any existing environments will need to be recreated fresh or they will continue to try and talk to the old cluster that no longer exists.