<p>I manually install a kubernetes cluster of 3 nodes (1 master, 2 slave). Now, I want to perform a upgrade of the k8s version (say, from 1.7 to 1.11). As the gap is long, the preferred method would be to forcefully reinstalled all the required packages. Is it a better way to do this? If yes, could you please tell me how?</p>

<p>Assume I do the upgrade by re-installing packages, I would want to manually backup everything (configuration, namespaces, and especially persistent volumes). From the kubernetes homepage, I found juju is recommended. but as I'm not running juju, what would be an alternative to do it manually?</p>

<p>Thank you!</p>

<p>They do not recommend skipping minor releases. So you should upgrade to 1.8 then 1.9 and so on. They support deprecated apis for one release, so for example if you have any deployments they are on extensions beta API which will not be supported by 1.11 release where they are on the apps API</p>

<p>I don't think you're doing yourself any favors by trying to skip stuff. Either way it will be a long manual process</p>
