Workerless `Shoot`s

What is a Workerless Shoot and how to create one

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Workerless Shoots

Starting from v1.71, users can create a Shoot without any workers, known as a “workerless Shoot”. Previously, worker nodes had to always be included even if users only needed the Kubernetes control plane. With workerless Shoots, Gardener will not create any worker nodes or anything related to them.

Here’s an example manifest for a local workerless Shoot:

apiVersion: core.gardener.cloud/v1beta1
kind: Shoot
metadata:
  name: local
  namespace: garden-local
spec:
  cloudProfile:
    name: local
  region: local
  provider:
    type: local
  kubernetes:
    version: 1.31.1

⚠️ It’s important to note that a workerless Shoot cannot be converted to a Shoot with workers or vice versa.

As part of the control plane, the following components are deployed in the seed cluster for workerless Shoot:

  • etcds
  • kube-apiserver
  • kube-controller-manager
  • gardener-resource-manager
  • logging and monitoring components
  • extension components (if they support workerless Shoots, see here)