Tools

You need the following tools for setting up the deployment workflow on Kubernetes locally.

microk8s

The smallest, fastest, fully-conformant Kubernetes that track upstream releases and makes clustering trivial. MicroK8s is great for offline development, prototyping, and testing.

We'll need a local instance of Kubernetes running so we can deploy the manifests and see if everything is running perfectly. There are a lot of options like minikube, microk8s kind etc. In this guide, we will choose microk8s because it's quite easy to set up and get all components up and running without much pain.

microk8s installs a lightweight Kubernetes cluster with bare minimum components required in the control plane. Additional add-ons can be configured with microk8s enable <addon-name>.

NOTE: I tried other alternatives as well before microk8s and here are a few reasons to not go ahead with them:

• minikube runs everything in a VM which is quite slow and resource-intensive.
• A minor issue with kind is that if you reboot your system, the docker container in which the control plane runs is in stopped state. There's no kind restart as of yet, so you'll have to re-deploy your app after recreating the cluster.

It's no biggie if you prefer another CNCF compliant K8s platform of your choice, the rest of the guide remains the same for you.

Install Instructions: microk8s.io/docs

Once you've installed microk8s, let's verify that our cluster is up.

$ microk8s.kubectl get nodes
NAME   STATUS   ROLES    AGE     VERSION
work   Ready    <none>   6m22s   v1.17.2

kubectl

Kubectl is a command-line tool for interacting with the Kubernetes API server and managing the cluster.

You can read more about kubectl here

Install kubectl

You can find instructions to install kubectl in your system here.

Configure kubectl

kubectl looks for KUBECONFIG environment variable or ~/.kube/config for path to config file. The config file consists of metadata about the cluster and the user. kubectl is a CLI wrapper for HTTP calls to the API server. As you guessed, the API has Authorization and Authentication and if you have multiple users in a cluster to manage you need kubectl to tell which user it's going to connect as. This piece of information is called a context. context holds the cluster name and user name. You can easily switch between contexts to log in as a different user or a different cluster altogether. Think of "context" as profiles. The context which is active at the moment is called current-context.

Power tools for kubectl

kubectx is a nice utility to switch between clusters and namespaces.

kubekutr

Cookie cutter templating tool for scaffolding K8s manifests

Disclaimer: This is a project which I developed after wrangling a lot of Kubernetes resource manifests by hand.

You can find more details about the project on GitHub.

Install kubekutr

You can download pre-compiled binaries for kubekutr from GitHub. Grab the latest version from there and put it in your $PATH (e.g. to /usr/local/bin/kubekutr)

kustomize

Customization of Kubernetes YAML configurations

Install kustomize

You can find instructions to install kubectl in your system here.