Until version 7.14.0 and ECK version 2.10.0, Elastic Agent and Fleet Server were required to run as root.

As of Elastic Stack version 7.14.0 and ECK version 2.10.0 it is also possible to run Elastic Agent and Fleet as a non-root user. See Storing local state in host path volume for instructions.

Until ECK version 2.11.0, Elastic Agent and Fleet Server were required to run within the same Namespace as Elasticsearch.

As of ECK version 2.11.0, Elastic Agent, Fleet Server and Elasticsearch can all be deployed in different Namespaces.

Running Endpoint Security integration is not yet supported in containerized environments, like Kubernetes. This is not an ECK limitation, but the limitation of the integration itself. Note that you can use ECK to deploy Elasticsearch, Kibana and Fleet Server, and add Endpoint Security integration to your policies if Elastic Agents running those policies are deployed in non-containerized environments.

When deployed with ECK, the Fleet Server Pod makes an HTTP call to itself during Fleet initialization using its Service. Since a Pod cannot reach itself through its Service on minikube when CNI is disabled, the call hangs until the connection times out and the Pod enters a crash loop.

Solution: enable CNI when starting minikube: minikube start --cni=true.

Elastic Agent managed by ECK stores local state in a host path volume by default. This ensures that integrations run by the agent can continue their work without duplicating work that has already been done after the Pod has been recreated for example because of a Pod configuration change. Multiple replicas of an agent, for example Fleet Servers, can not be deployed on the same underlying Kubernetes node as they would try to use the same host path. There are 2 options for managing this feature:

Full configuration examples exist in Running as a non-root user.