KCM need to gracefully terminate so the next replica can take over during a rollout. Graceful termination is important for giving up the lease, so another replica can become the leader without waiting 60s for the lease to expire. KCM is especially important to be available as much as we can because it runs the endpoints controller which has to notice pods going down / rolling out and update service ASAP to stop sending traffic there.
Moving the bug to verified state as i see that when KCM terminates other replica becomes leader in ~2 seconds. [ramakasturinarra@dhcp35-60 verification-tests]$ oc get clusterversion NAME VERSION AVAILABLE PROGRESSING SINCE STATUS version 4.6.0-0.nightly-2020-09-22-011738 True False 5h34m Cluster version is 4.6.0-0.nightly-2020-09-22-011738 steps followed to verify the bug: =================================== 1) check KCM leader 2) move kube-controller-manager-config.yaml from /etc/kubernetes/manifests to some other directory 3) check logs of all kcm pods Node on which file was moved you will see a message as below and with in 10 seconds you should see another replica becoming kcm leader. In my case i see that with in 2 seconds another replica become kcm leader. I0922 09:54:26.950366 1 controllermanager.go:320] Requested to terminate. Exiting. (First KCM leader getting terminated) I0922 09:54:28.625305 1 leaderelection.go:253] successfully acquired lease kube-system/kube-controller-manager ( Another replica acquiring the lease and becoming leader) I0922 09:54:28.625405 1 controllermanager.go:245] using legacy client builder I0922 09:54:28.625407 1 event.go:291] "Event occurred" object="kube-system/kube-controller-manager" kind="ConfigMap" apiVersion="v1" type="Normal" reason="LeaderElection" message="ip-1 0-0-172-204_ff2b0d0f-d145-4cc3-b89a-1bc049f0371a became leader"
Since the problem described in this bug report should be resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For information on the advisory (OpenShift Container Platform 4.6 GA Images), and where to find the updated files, follow the link below. If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report. https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2020:4196