Cluster add-ons are Services and Replication Controllers (with pods) that are shipped with the Kubernetes binaries and are considered an inherent part of the Kubernetes clusters. The add-ons are visible through the API (they can be listed using kubectl), but manipulation of these objects is discouraged because the system will bring them back to the original state, in particular:

• if an add-on is stopped, it will be restarted automatically
• if an add-on is rolling-updated (for Replication Controllers), the system will stop the new version and start the old one again (or perform rolling update to the old version, in the future).

On the cluster, the add-ons are kept in /etc/kubernetes/addons on the master node, in yaml files (json is not supported at the moment). A system daemon periodically checks if the contents of this directory is consistent with the add-on objects on the API server. If any difference is spotted, the system updates the API objects accordingly. (Limitation: for now, the system compares only the names of objects in the directory and on the API server. So changes in parameters may not be noticed). So the only persistent way to make changes in add-ons is to update the manifests on the master server. But still, users are discouraged to do it on their own - they should rather wait for a new release of Kubernetes that will also contain new versions of add-ons.

Each add-on must specify the following label: kubernetes.io/cluster-service: true. Yaml files that do not define this label will be ignored.

The naming convention for Replication Controllers is <basename>-<version>, where <basename> is the same in consecutive versions and <version> changes when the component is updated (<version> must not contain -). For instance, heapster-controller-v1 and heapster-controller-12 are the same controllers with two different versions, while heapster-controller-v1 and heapster-newcontroller-12 are treated as two different applications. When a new version of a Replication Controller add-on is found, the system will stop the old (current) replication controller and start the new one (in the future, rolling update will be performed).

For services, the naming scheme is just <basename> (with empty version number) because we do not expect the service name to change in consecutive versions (and rolling-update of services does not exist).

To update add-ons, just update the contents of /etc/kubernetes/addons directory with the desired definition of add-ons. Then the system will take care of:

1. Removing the objects from the API server whose manifest was removed.
2. This is done for add-ons in the system that do not have a manifest file with the same basename
3. Creating objects from new manifests
4. This is done for manifests that do not correspond to existing API objects with the same basename
5. Updating objects whose basename is the same, but whose versions changed.
6. The update is currently performed by removing the old object and creating the new one. In the future, rolling update of replication controllers will be implemented to keep the add-on services up and running during update of add-on pods.
7. Note that this cannot happen for Services as their version is always empty.

Note that in order to run the updator script, python is required on the machine. For OS distros that don't have python installed, a python container will be used.