Upgrading Orka Anywhere

Orka Anywhere is any Orka deployment you run and manage yourself, whether that’s AWS-hosted or fully on-premises, as opposed to a MacStadium-managed deployment. Upgrades are self-service: you run the same Ansible-based process you used to stand up your cluster, pointed at the Ansible image tagged for your target release. There are two parts to every upgrade:

• Services upgrade: upgrades the Orka Kubernetes services.
• Node tooling upgrade: updates the Virtual Kubelet and Orka Engine on your ARM Mac nodes in place, without replacing the node.

Review the release notes for your target version before upgrading.

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AWS-hosted

Fully documented today. See Upgrading Orka on AWS for the full step-by-step, including node tag verification, SSH and SSM upgrade paths for ARM node tooling, and multi-region guidance.

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On-premises

On-premises upgrades reuse the exact same ghcr.io/macstadium/orka-ansible-onprem container and the same cluster.yml, nodes.yml, and hosts files you used to install, from Orka On-Prem architecture and networking overview. The playbooks are idempotent, re-running them re-converges your cluster to the target version rather than requiring a separate upgrade procedure. One thing differs from install:

1. Use your target version’s tag in place of <version_tag> in both docker run commands: Installing the Orka Cluster Services for the services upgrade (ansible-playbook site.yml), Setting Up Mac Nodes for the ARM node tooling upgrade (ansible-playbook configure-arm.yml -i hosts --ask-become-pass).

You don’t normally need to set osx_node_orka_engine_version or osx_node_orka_vk_version in nodes.yml for a routine upgrade. Set them only if MacStadium has given you a specific build to deploy, for example a custom build for your environment. Node tooling (Virtual Kubelet and Orka Engine) is version-gated rather than blindly replaced: the playbook compares the installed version against the target and only updates on a mismatch, so re-running against nodes already on the target version is a no-op.

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Hybrid deployments (EKS control plane + on-premises Mac nodes)

If your deployment combines an EKS control plane on AWS with Mac nodes on-premises, upgrade each part using the workflow for where it runs: the AWS guide above for the control plane and AWS-side services, and the on-premises path for your Mac nodes.

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After the upgrade

Download and install the orka3 CLI version matching your upgraded cluster, if you haven’t already.