Requirements

Before installing Pixie to your Kubernetes cluster, please ensure that your system meets the requirements below.

Please refer to the install guides for information on how to install Pixie to your K8s cluster.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes v1.21+ is required.

The following tables list Kubernetes environments that have been tested with Pixie.

Pixie may work on other K8s environments. If you find an unlisted K8s environment that works well, please let us know by opening a GitHub issue or by creating a pull request that updates this doc.

Production Environments

K8s Environment	Support
AKS	Supported
EKS	Supported (includes support on Bottlerocket AMIs)
EKS Fargate	Not Supported (Fargate does not support eBPF)
GKE	Supported
GKE Autopilot	Not Supported (Autopilot does not support eBPF)
OKE	Supported
OpenShift	Supported
kOps	Supported
Self-hosted	Generally supported, see requirements below including Linux kernel version.

Local Development Environments

For local development, we recommend using Minikube with a VM driver (kvm2 on Linux, hyperkit on Mac). Note that Kubernetes environments that run inside a container are not currently supported.

K8s Environment	Support
Docker Desktop	Not supported
Rancher Desktop	Supported for containerd container runtime (not supported for dockerd runtime)
k0s	Supported
k3s	Supported
k3d	Not Supported (k3d runs k3s clusters inside Docker container "nodes")
kind	Not Supported (kind runs K8s clusters inside Docker container "nodes")
minikube with `driver=kvm2`	Supported
minikube with `driver=hyperkit`	Supported
minikube with `driver=docker`	Not Supported
minikube with `driver=none`	Not Supported

Operating System

Pixie runs on Linux nodes only. You can configure Pixie to deploy to a subset of the nodes in your cluster.

	Support	Version
Linux	Supported	v4.14+
Windows	Not Supported	Not in roadmap

Linux Distribution

The following table lists Linux distributions that are known to work with Pixie.

	Version
CentOS	7.3+
Debian	10+
RedHat Enterprise Linux	8+
Ubuntu	18.04+

We recommended that Linux headers be installed on a cluster's nodes.

Pixie may also work on other distributions. If you find an unlisted Linux distribution that works well, please let us know by opening a GitHub issue or by creating a pull request that updates this doc.

CPU

Pixie requires an x86-64 architecture.

	Support
x86-64	Supported
ARM	Not Supported

Memory

Pixie requires the following memory per node:

Minimum	Notes
1GiB	To accommodate application pods, we recommend using no more than 25% of the nodes' total memory for Pixie.

Pixie deploys its PEMs as a DaemonSet on your cluster in order to collect and store telemetry data. The default memory limit is 2Gi per PEM. The lowest recommended value is 1Gi per PEM. For more information on how to configure Pixie's memory usage, see the Tuning Memory Usage page.

Network Traffic

Pixie's Vizier module sends outgoing HTTPS/2 requests to Pixie's Cloud on port 443.

Your cluster's telemetry data flows through Pixie's Cloud via a reverse proxy as encrypted traffic without any persistence. This allows users to access data without being in the same VPC/network as the cluster. Pixie offers end-to-end encryption for telemetry data in flight.

To install Pixie in an air gapped environment, see this install guide.

Pod Security Context

Pixie interacts with the Linux kernel to install BPF programs to collect telemetry data. In order to install BPF programs, Pixie vizier-pem-* pods require privileged access.

Kubernetes Production Environments Local Development Environments Operating System Linux Distribution CPU Memory Network Traffic Pod Security Context

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