An HA cluster with external etcd is a topology where the distributed data storage cluster provided by etcd is external to the cluster formed by the nodes that run control plane components.

Like the stacked etcd topology, each control plane node in an external etcd topology runs an instance of the kube-apiserver, kube-scheduler, and kube-controller-manager. And the kube-apiserver is exposed to worker nodes using a load balancer. However, etcd members run on separate hosts, and each etcd host communicates with the kube-apiserver of each control plane node.

This topology decouples the control plane and etcd member. It therefore provides an HA setup where losing a control plane instance or an etcd member has less impact and does not affect the cluster redundancy as much as the stacked HA topology.

However, this topology requires twice the number of hosts as the stacked HA topology. A minimum of three hosts for control plane nodes and three hosts for etcd nodes are required for an HA cluster with this topology.