K8S Cluster on Laptop

Why K8S Cluster on Laptop?

A few years back I wrote a blog on setting up a Big Data Cluster on the laptop.  This time it's about setting up a K8S Cluster on the laptop. There are a few Zero-Installation K8S setup which can be run in the browser like Katakoda Kubernetes, Play with Kubernetes and K8S can also be run in Cloud (AWS EKS, Google GKE and Azure AKS). So, why install K8S Cluster on the Laptop? Here a few reasons I can think of.

• It's absolutely free
• Will get comfortable with the K8S administration concepts
• Will know what happens behind the scenes to some extent
• Above mentioned Katakoda and Play with Kubernetes were slow
• Finally, because we can :)

More details

As mentioned in the K8S documentation there are a tons of options for installing it. I used a tool called kubeadm which is part of the K8S project. The official documentation for kubeadm is good, but it's  a bit too generic with a lot of options and also too lengthy. I found that the documentation from linuxconfig.org to be good and up to the point. There are few things missing in the documentation, but it's good to get started.

I would be writing a detailed article on the setup procedure, but here a few highlights for anyone to get started.

• Used Oracle VirtualBox to setup three VMs and installed master on one of them and slaves on the other two.

• Used a laptop with the below configuration. It has a HDD, an SSD would have saved lot more time during the installation process and also the K8S Cluster boot process (< 2 minutes on HDD).

• Even after the K8S Cluster was started, the Laptop was still responsive. Below in the System Monitor after starting the K8S Cluster.

•  Below shows kubectl commands to get the list of nodes, services and also to invoke the service.

Final thoughts

There are two K8S Certifications Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) Program and Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Program from CNCF. The CKAD Certification was started recently and is much more easier than the CKA Certification.

The practice for CKAD Certification can done in Minikube which was discussed in the earlier blogs (Linux and Windows). But, for the CKA Certification setting up a Cluster with different configurations, troubleshooting is required and so setting up a Cluster is required.

Installation using kubeadm was easy, it automates the entire installation process. Installing from scratch would be definitely interesting (here and here). We will get to know what happens behind the scene.

It took a couple of hours to setup a K8S Cluster. Most of the time was spent on installing the Guest OS, cloning it, fine tuning to make sure K8S runs on a Laptop etc. The actual installation and basic testing of the K8S Cluster took less than 10 minutes.

In the upcoming blog, we will look at setting up a K8S Cluster on Laptop. Keep looking !!!