Installation Tools

This chapter is about Kubernetes installation and configuration. We are going to review a few installation mechanisms that you can use to create your own Kubernetes cluster.

To get started without having to dive right away into installing and configuring a cluster, there are a few choices.

One way is to use Google Container Engine (GKE), a cloud service from the Google Cloud Platform, that lets you request a Kubernetes cluster with the latest stable version. Amazon has a service called Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) which allows more control of the cp nodes.

Another easy way to get started is to use Minikube. It is a single binary which deploys into the Oracle VirtualBox software, which can run in several operating systems. While Minikube is local and single node, it will give you a learning, testing, and development platform. MicroK8s is a newer tool tool developed by Canonical, and aimed at easy installation. Aimed at appliance-like installations, it currently runs on Ubuntu 16.04 and later.

To be able to use the Kubernetes cluster, you will need to have installed the Kubernetes command line, called kubectl. This runs locally on your machine and targets the API server endpoint. It allows you to create, manage, and delete all Kubernetes resources (e.g. Pods, Deployments, Services). It is a powerful CLI that we will use throughout the rest of this course. So, you should become familiar with it.

In this course, we will use kubeadm, the community-suggested tool from the Kubernetes project, that makes installing Kubernetes easy and avoids vendor-specific installers. Getting a cluster running involves two commands: kubeadm init, that you run on a cp node, and then, kubeadm join, that you run on your worker or redundant cp nodes, and your cluster bootstraps itself. The flexibility of these tools allows Kubernetes to be deployed in a number of places. Lab exercises use this method.

We will also talk about other installation mechanisms, such as kubespray or kops, another way to create a Kubernetes cluster on AWS nodes.

As Kubernetes is so popular, there are several other tools you may use to configure a cluster. Some may become popular, others may become defunct within months.