Kubernetes The Hard Way on KVM

This tutorial walks you through setting up Kubernetes the hard way. This guide is not for people looking for a fully automated command to bring up a Kubernetes cluster. If that's you then check out Google Kubernetes Engine, or the Getting Started Guides.

Kubernetes The Hard Way is optimized for learning, which means taking the long route to ensure you understand each task required to bootstrap a Kubernetes cluster.

The results of this tutorial should not be viewed as production ready, and may receive limited support from the community, but don't let that stop you from learning!

Major Changes from Original Kubernetes the Hard Way

• Instead of GCP, KVM is used.
• HA Proxy is used as a load balancer for API Server.
• KVM host is in charge of Pod Network Routes.
• Cloud Shell in GCP is replaced by a virtual machine.
• Nodes' name and IP address starts from 1 (Note that the name of etcd nodes starts from etcd-0).
• The order of chapters are a little bit changed.
• The version of Ubuntu is xenial.
• (Todo) Additional information is added for CKA Exam.

Target Audience

The target audience for this tutorial is someone planning to support a production Kubernetes cluster and wants to understand how everything fits together.

Also this tutorial assumes that the audience have some experiences of KVM (i.e. creating and deleting VMs).

Cluster Details

Kubernetes The Hard Way guides you through bootstrapping a highly available Kubernetes cluster with end-to-end encryption between components and RBAC authentication.

• Kubernetes 1.12.0
• containerd Container Runtime 1.2.0-rc.0
• gVisor 50c283b9f56bb7200938d9e207355f05f79f0d17
• CNI Container Networking 0.6.0
• etcd v3.3.9
• CoreDNS v1.2.2

Table of Contents

This tutorial assumes you have an KVM host or a Linux PC running KVM. While KVM host is used for basic infrastructure requirements the lessons learned in this tutorial may be applied to other platforms.

• Prerequisites
• Provisioning Compute Resources
• Installing the Client Tools
• Provisioning the CA and Generating TLS Certificates
• Generating Kubernetes Configuration Files for Authentication
• Generating the Data Encryption Config and Key
• Bootstrapping the etcd Cluster
• Bootstrapping the Kubernetes Control Plane
• Bootstrapping the Kubernetes Worker Nodes
• Configuring kubectl for Remote Access
• Adding Pod Network Routes
• Deploying the DNS Cluster Add-on
• Smoke Test
• Cleaning Up

References

Kubernetes

• Kubernetes The Hard Way
• Kubernetes The Hard Way - Bare Metal

HA Proxy

• Load Balancing with HAProxy
• How to Use HAProxy for Load Balancing
• HAProxy TCP Reverse Proxy Setup Guide (SSL/TLS Passthrough Proxy)
• TLS errors in apiserver when running with calico
• Building HAProxy so that it can use TLSv1.3

tmux

• tmux Tutorial — Split Terminal Windows Easily
• How do I equally balance tmux(1) split panes?

SSH

• Copy SSH RSA security key for multiple servers