Running in air-gapped environments

The ECK operator can be run in an air-gapped environment without access to the open internet when it is configured not to pull container images from docker.elastic.co.

By default ECK does not require you to specify the container image for each Elastic Stack application you deploy.

apiVersion: elasticsearch.k8s.elastic.co/v1
kind: Elasticsearch
metadata:
  name: quickstart
spec:
  version: 8.16.1
  # image: docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:8.16.1 
  nodeSets:
  - name: default
    count: 1

ECK will automatically set the correct container image for each application. When running in an air-gapped or offline environment you will have to mirror the official Elastic container images in a private container image registry. To make use of your mirrored images you can either set the image for each application explicitly as shown in the preceding example or more conveniently override the default container registry as explained in the next section.

When creating custom resources (Elasticsearch, Kibana, APM Server, Enterprise Search, Beats, Elastic Agent, and Elastic Maps Server), the operator defaults to using container images pulled from the docker.elastic.co registry. If you are in an environment where external network access is restricted, you can configure the operator to use a different default container registry by starting the operator with the --container-registry command-line flag. Check Configure ECK for more information on how to configure the operator using command-line flags and environment variables.

The operator expects container images to be located at specific paths in the default container registry. Make sure that your container images are stored at the right path and are tagged correctly with the stack version number. For example, if your private registry is my.registry and you wish to deploy components from stack version 8.16.1, the following image paths should exist:

The eck-diagnostics tool optionally runs diagnostics for Elastic Stack applications in a separate container that is deployed into the Kubernetes cluster.

In air-gapped environments with no access to the docker.elastic.co registry, you should copy the latest support-diagnostics container image to your internal image registry and then run the tool with the additional flag --diagnostic-image <custom-support-diagnostics-image-name>. To find out which support diagnostics container image matches your version of eck-diagnostics run the tool once without arguments and it will print the default image in use.