How OpenYurt v1.2 Simplifies Edge Kubernetes Installation in Five Steps

Background

OpenYurt is the industry’s first non‑intrusive cloud‑native edge computing platform. Built on Kubernetes, it aims to provide unified management of massive edge workloads while preserving the native Kubernetes experience.

Installation Optimization in v1.2.0

The v1.2.0 release refines the installation workflow, eliminating any configuration changes to the underlying Kubernetes cluster and reducing the process from ten steps to five.

Optimized Installation Steps

Initialize a Kubernetes cluster and install the Flannel network plugin and CoreDNS.

Label cloud nodes to distinguish them from edge nodes (cloud nodes host control and observability components).

Deploy OpenYurt control components: Yurt-Controller-Manager manages pod lifecycles on autonomous nodes, and Yurt-App-Manager provides cross‑region resource and business management.

Deploy the cross‑network communication component Raven , which builds VPN tunnels between cloud and edge. Raven-Controller-Manager manages gateway nodes, while Raven‑Agent creates the VPN and handles routing.

Join edge nodes using the latest yurtadm one‑click tool, which automatically installs the autonomous edge component Yurt‑Hub .

Prometheus Practice with the New Raven Component

With Raven’s enhancements in v1.2, Prometheus and MetricsServer deployment follows the same workflow as on a native Kubernetes cluster, removing the need for special Yurt‑Tunnel or CoreDNS configurations. Monitoring data from edge nodes is transmitted through the VPN tunnel to cloud‑side observability components.

Example Prometheus scrape configuration for kubelet metrics (read‑only port 10255) can be applied directly:

- job_name: 'kubelet'
  kubernetes_sd_configs:
    - role: node
  scheme: https
  tls_config:
    ca_file: /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/ca.crt
    insecure_skip_verify: true
  authorization:
    credentials_file: /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/token
  relabel_configs:
    - action: labelmap
      regex: __meta_kubernetes_node_label_(.+)
    - source_labels: [__address__]
      action: replace
      target_label: __address__
      regex: ([^:;]+):(\d+)
      replacement: ${1}:10255
    - source_labels: [__scheme__]
      action: replace
      target_label: __scheme__
      regex: https
      replacement: http

Future Plans

Raven will be packaged as a Helm chart, and all OpenYurt controllers will be merged into a single Yurt‑Manager component, also installable via Helm.

The installation flow will be further simplified to three steps: initialize the Kubernetes cluster → install OpenYurt components → join nodes.