The way you deploy Kubernetes (k8s) on AWS will be similar to how it was done in a previous post on vSphere. You still setup nodes, you still deploy kubeadm, and kubectl but there are a few differences when you change your cloud provider. For instance on AWS we can use the LoadBalancer resource against the k8s API and have AWS provision an elastic load balancer for us. These features take a few extra tweaks in AWS. ...
If you’re struggling to deploy Kubernetes (k8s) clusters, you’re not alone. There are a bunch of different ways to deploy Kubernetes and there are different settings depending on what cloud provider you’re using. This post will focus on installing Kubernetes on vSphere with Kubeadm. At the end of this post, you should have what you need to manually deploy k8s in a vSphere environment on ubuntu. Prerequisites NOTE: This tutorial uses the “in-tree” cloud provider for vSphere. This is not the preferred method for deployment going forward. More details can be found here for reference. ...
Sometimes we need to run a container to do a specific task, and when its completed, we want it to quit. Many containers are deployed and continuously run, such as a web server. But other times we want to accomplish a single task and then quit. This is where a Job is a good choice. Jobs and CronJobs - The Theory Perhaps, we need to run a batch process on demand. Maybe we built an automation routine for something and want to kick it off through the use of a container. We can do this by submitting a job to the Kubernetes API. Kubernetes will run the job to completion and then quit. ...
One of my least favorite parts of computers is dealing with certificate creation. In fact, ya know those tweets about what you’d tweet if you were kidnapped and didn’t want to tip off the kidnapers? Yeah, I’d tweet about how I love working with certificates. They are just not a fun thing for me. So when I found a new project where I needed certificates created, I was not really excited. ...
Securing and hardening our Kubernetes clusters is a must do activity. We need to remember that containers are still just processes running on the host machines. Sometimes these processes can get more privileges on the Kubernetes node than they should, if you don’t properly setup some pod security. This post explains how this could be done for your own clusters. Pod Security Policies - The Theory Pod Security policies are designed to limit what can be run on a Kubernetes cluster. Typical things that you might want to limit are: pods that have privileged access, pods with access to the host network, and pods that have access to the host processes just to name a few. Remember that a container isn’t as isolated as a VM so we should take care to ensure our containers aren’t adversely affecting our nodes’s health and security. ...
There are a myraid of ways to deploy Kubernetes clusters these days. Kubernetes the Hard Way Cluster API Kubeadm Kubespray kops Those are just a few of the ways and I’m sure you’ll have a favorite. But for the work I’ve been doing lately, I don’t want to spend a bunch of time cloning repos, updating configs, running ansible scripts and the like, just to get another clean kubernetes cluster in my lab to break. So, I took the individual parts of a Kubernetes build and created a list of ordered jobs in my Jenkins server. ...
Deploying Kubernetes clusters may be the biggest hurdle in learning Kubernetes and one of the challenges in managing Kubernetes. ClusterAPI is a project designed to ease this burden and make the management and deployment of Kubernetes clusters simpler. The Cluster API is a Kubernetes project to bring declarative, Kubernetes-style APIs to cluster creation, configuration, and management. It provides optional, additive functionality on top of core Kubernetes. kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api This post is designed to dive into ClusterAPI to investigate how it works, and how you can use it. ...
In the traditional server world, we’ve taken great lengths to ensure that we can micro-segment our servers instead of relying on a few select firewalls at strategically defined chokepoints. What do we do in the container world though? This is where network policies come into play. Network Policies - The Theory In a default deployment of a Kubernetes cluster, all of the pods deployed on the nodes can communicate with each other. Some security folks might not like to hear that, but never fear, we have ways to limit the communications between pods and they’re called network policies. ...
In programming, we sometime set breakpoints as a way of debugging our code. Maybe a small piece of our routine isn’t functioning optimally and we want the program to pause, part way through, so we can identify the issues with that one section of code. These breakpoints might be great for coding, but we can apply this to our own lives as well. I’ve recently switched jobs and between ending my previous job and starting the new one, I took some time off. My own personal breakpoint where I paused the larger routine (in this metaphor, the routine is my work life) so that I could focus on pieces of my life that might need more attention. ...
I’m not going to lie to you, as of the time of this writing, maybe the biggest hurdle to learning Kubernetes is getting a cluster stood up. Right now there are a myriad of ways so stand up a cluster, but none of them are really straight forward yet. If you’re interested in learning how Kubernetes works, and just want to setup a basic cluster to poke around in, this post is for you. ...