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Building A Kubernetes Cluster

There are many tools around for running Kubernetes - so many that special interest groups (SIGs) have been around supporting the development and operations of Kubernetes.

Clusters On A Single Host

A Laptop. A VM.
Here's one comparison of cluster tools.

minikube

A SIG project.
Spawns a VM, "...essentially a single node K8s cluster".
Can be used on all major OS.

minikube start
# ...wait...

kubectl

# try this for a gui-driven overview of the cluster
minikube dashboard

kind

A SIG project.
The cluster that kind starts is in docker containers.

kind create cluster
# ...wait...

# load a local image into a cluster
kind load docker-image image-name:tag-version

K3s

Built by Rancher Labs.
This is a mini kubernetes.
Uses sqlite instead of etcd3.
This seems, perhaps, best run in containers & not directly on the host - leverage the racher/k3s image.
K3s has auto-deployment: deployable manifests+charts, watches for changes, and applies changes automagically.

microk8s

Cannonical. ubuntu. K8s.
Single &/or multi-node cluster.

kubeadm

Seems like a mvp k8s setup supported directly by kubernetes.io?!

Hosted

GCP. AWS. Microsoft Azure.
These all support cloud-hosted k8s clusters.

Browser-Ready

kodekloud.com

Minikube In-Depth

Minikube gives a single-node k8s cluster in a docker image.
Requires:

  • a hypervisor
    • prob will use virtualbox
  • kubectl
  • minikube.exe

Some Tools to checkout && potentially download:

  • VirtualBox
  • MiniKube
    • when using minikube with a virtualization tech, use a flag on startup: minikube start --vm-driver=<driver-name> (docs here)

Minikube on an M1 with Docker

Some Download Docs at the time of writing.

Install Docker.
Install kubectl, then install minikube.

Download && install minikube:

# download
# ~73MB for me
curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-darwin-arm64
# NOTE: the -L flag tells curl to follow any url relocation 
# NOTE: the -O flag tells curl to save the output to a similarly-named file that it found

# install 
sudo install minikube-darwin-arm64 /usr/local/bin/minikube

Run minikube:

minikube start --driver=docker --alsologtostderr
# this took some time...with a bunch of logs

See a new docker container running!

docker container ls -a

should show 1 with

  • image of gcr.io/k8s-minikube/kicbase:vX.X.XX
  • name of minikube
  • ports... a bunch of ports...
    • 0.0.0.0:57832->22/tcp
    • 0.0.0.0:57828->2376/tcp
    • 0.0.0.0:57830->5000/tcp
    • 0.0.0.0:57831->8443/tcp
    • 0.0.0.0:57829->32443/tcp

The Download Docs Approach

  1. install + prep kubectl tool
    1. curl from storage.googleapis.com etc
    2. make it executable
      1. chmod +X ./kubectl
    3. move the util it to the user local bin
      1. sudeomv ./kubectl /usr/local/bun/kubectl
  2. test it!
    1. kubectl version
  3. install + setup minikube
    1. MAKE SURE VIRTUALIZATION IS ENABLED ON MY MACHINE

Run minikube:

minikube start --driver=docker --alsologtostderr
# this took some time...with a bunch of logs

See a new docker container running!

docker container ls -a

should show 1 with

  • image of gcr.io/k8s-minikube/kicbase:vX.X.XX
  • name of minikube
  • ports... a bunch of ports...
    • 0.0.0.0:57832->22/tcp
    • 0.0.0.0:57828->2376/tcp
    • 0.0.0.0:57830->5000/tcp
    • 0.0.0.0:57831->8443/tcp
    • 0.0.0.0:57829->32443/tcp

See that things have been setup correctly:

# start the minikube cluster
minkube start

# interact with the cluster
kubectl get po -A
NAMESPACE     NAME                               READY   STATUS    RESTARTS      AGE
kube-system   coredns-6d4b75cb6d-82746           1/1     Running   3 (30h ago)   32h
kube-system   etcd-minikube                      1/1     Running   3 (24h ago)   32h
kube-system   kube-apiserver-minikube            1/1     Running   3 (30h ago)   32h
kube-system   kube-controller-manager-minikube   1/1     Running   3 (30h ago)   32h
kube-system   kube-proxy-rsnhm                   1/1     Running   3 (30h ago)   32h
kube-system   kube-scheduler-minikube            1/1     Running   2 (24h ago)   32h
kube-system   storage-provisioner                0/1     Error     4 (24h ago)   32h

# 
kubectl get nodes
Tags:
Kubernetes
k8s
setup