3 minutes
Building a Kubernetes Cluster with k8s@Home - Pt. 00
What’s happening?!
It’s time! Time to migrate my cluster to something even more exciting! I’ve got a couple new nodes, I’ve got some motivation, and some time on my hands!
Following the k8s@home template cluster, I’m going to be migrating my cluster to a public format so that it’s viewable online, and also secure!
We’ll be migrating my app deployments from my personal cluster, which I had running on a Hades Canyon NUC, to 3 nodes:
- Dell PowerEdge R720 (Worker Node)
- Cisco UCS C220 M3 (Worker Node)
- Hades Canyon NUC (Control Node)
I’ll be adding content from the k8s@Home readme below for their template cluster, so you can see what we’ll be doing! I’ll be following this initially to a T, so this is accurate!
Prerequisites
💻 Systems
- One or more nodes with a fresh install of Ubuntu Server 20.04. These nodes can be bare metal or VMs.
- A Cloudflare account with a domain, this will be managed by Terraform.
- Some experience in debugging problems and a positive attitude ;)
🔧 Tools
📍 You should install the below CLI tools on your workstation. Make sure you pull in the latest versions.
Required
| Tool | Purpose |
|---|---|
| ansible | Preparing Ubuntu for Kubernetes and installing k3s |
| direnv | Exports env vars based on present working directory |
| flux | Operator that manages your k8s cluster based on your Git repository |
| age | A simple, modern and secure encryption tool (and Go library) with small explicit keys, no config options, and UNIX-style composability. |
| go-task | A task runner / simpler Make alternative written in Go |
| ipcalc | Used to verify settings in the configure script |
| jq | Used to verify settings in the configure script |
| kubectl | Allows you to run commands against Kubernetes clusters |
| sops | Encrypts k8s secrets with Age |
| terraform | Prepare a Cloudflare domain to be used with the cluster |
Optional
| Tool | Purpose |
|---|---|
| helm | Manage Kubernetes applications |
| kustomize | Template-free way to customize application configuration |
| pre-commit | Runs checks pre git commit |
| gitleaks | Scan git repos (or files) for secrets |
| prettier | Prettier is an opinionated code formatter. |
⚠️ pre-commit
It is advisable to install pre-commit and the pre-commit hooks that come with this repository. sops-pre-commit and gitleaks will check to make sure you are not by accident committing your secrets un-encrypted.
After pre-commit is installed on your machine run:
task pre-commit:init
Remember to run this on each new clone of the repository for it to have effect.
Commands are of interest, for learning purposes:
This command makes it so pre-commit runs on git commit, and also installs environments per the config file.
pre-commit install --install-hooks
This command checks for new versions of hooks, though it will occasionally make mistakes, so verify its results.
pre-commit autoupdate
Let’s go!
For the rest of the initial setup, I’m following the README.md on k8s@home’s Template Cluster. Feel free to follow along!
The next post will be about my infrastructure-specific setup, as well as getting everything up and running!