Quoting Joel: In 4.14 there's been an effort to make Machine API optional, anything that that relies on the CRD needs to be able to detect that the CRD is not installed and then not error should that be the case. You should be able to use a discovery client to determine if the API group is installed or not

We have several controllers and informers that are depending on the machine API to be at least available to list and sync caches with. When the API is not installed at all the depending controllers are blocked forever and eventually get killed by the aliveness probe. That causes hot restart loops that cause installations to fail. 

4.14

always

1. install a machineAPI=false cluster
2. ??? 
3. watch it fail