Renovate keeps track of both Talos versions as well as Kubernetes versions. If a new version is released Renovate will create a pull request that we then can merge.
Talos does however not always support the latest version of Kubernetes. Therefor there is a Renovate configuration that defines which Kubernetes version is supported. Renovate will not create a pull request for an unsupported Kubernetes version.
There is a Github action that will automatically create a pull request that updates the allowed version when a new Talos release supports a newer version of Kubernetes.
I perfer to upgrade Talos on nodes one node at the time to minimize issues with for example Postgres and Rook/Ceph clusters. There is a task that checks status of Postgres and Rook/Ceph and sets Postgres in maintenance mode before upgrading Talos on the node. It uses the talhelper gencommand to generate the correct upgrade command for the specified node. The main benifit is that we get the correct installation image for the node.
task talos:upgrade-talos node=<name>Kubernetes can be upgraded by running:
task talos:upgrade-k8sThis script will first make a snapshot of Etcd that can be used for a disaster recovery if something would go wrong.
After that the script will tell Talos to start upgrading Kubernetes one node at the time.
to keep track of the upgrade progress you can use:
kubectl get nodes