Engineer Builds Highly Available Hub-and-Spoke Kubernetes Platform Using RKE2 and HAProxy

A software engineer has detailed the design of a hub-and-spoke Kubernetes platform built on RKE2, where a central hub cluster hosts shared tooling — including Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, ArgoCD, Harbor, and Vault — serving three identical spoke clusters running application workloads. The architecture eliminates redundant infrastructure by centralizing monitoring, container image storage, secrets management, and GitOps operations in a single hub, with spoke clusters shipping metrics and logs back to it. Each cluster, whether hub or spoke, follows the same high-availability skeleton: two HAProxy nodes with a floating VIP managed by Keepalived, three master nodes maintaining etcd quorum, and a dedicated worker tier. The three spoke clusters are topologically identical, differentiated only by subnet octets (192.168.11–13.0/24), while spokes additionally reserve an IP block for MetalLB to support LoadBalancer-type services. The design ensures control-plane continuity during node failures, with Keepalived recovering a failed load balancer's VIP within approximately four seconds.
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