Exploring the Options
Learn different ways to set up a Kubernetes cluster and figure out how to set it up locally.
We'll cover the following
Different ways to set up a cluster#
One of the goals of this course is to limit the learning expense to a minimum. True to that spirit, we ran Kubernetes cluster on the platform. In this chapter, you will learn how to create a local Kubernetes cluster on your machine.
There are quite a few ways to set up a local Kubernetes cluster:
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We could, for example, create a few nodes with Vagrant (a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow) and execute quite a few shell commands that would convert them into a Kubernetes cluster.
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We could go even further and create a VirtualBox image that would have all the required software pre-installed and use it to create Vagrant VMs.
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We could also use Ansible to run provisioning of those images as well as to execute all the commands required to join VMs into a cluster.
If we were using Docker Swarm, we’d have Docker for Mac or Windows (or run it natively on Linux) and execute a single docker swarm init command. That’s all that’s needed to create a local Docker Swarm cluster. Can we accomplish the same simplicity with Kubernetes?
The answer is Minikube.
Using minikube to set up a cluster
Minikube creates a single-node cluster inside a VM on your laptop. While that is not ideal, since we won’t be able to demonstrate some of the features Kubernetes provides in a multi-node setup, it should be more than enough to explain most of the concepts behind Kubernetes.
A Note to windows users#
Please run all the examples from GitBash (installed through Git). That way the commands you’ll see throughout the course will be same as those that should be executed on MacOS or any Linux distribution. If you’re using Hyper-V instead of VirtualBox, you may need to run the GitBash window as an Administrator.
