Installing Kubernetes on your Development Machine

 

I hear many developer that are using minikube to run kubernetes on their development machine.

Working on your local kubernetes during development stage can in many cases shorten development life-cycle, due to ability to quickly observe end to end behavior of the system. However, using minikube does not seems like the right way to do it. Minikube use a VM running on the development machine, hence the performance of the kubernetes cluster, and the load on the development machine are high.

Instead of using minikube, a good alternative is to install a bar metal kubernetes on the development machine. It might talk a bit longer to install, but the simplicity and performance of it sure make this method way better.

To install the kube* binaries on the development machine use the following script:

echo "Update the apt"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl

echo "Download the GCP signing key"
sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/kubernetes-archive-keyring.gpg https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg

echo "Add the Kubernetes apt repo"
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/kubernetes-archive-keyring.gpg] https://apt.kubernetes.io/ kubernetes-xenial main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kubernetes.list

echo "Update kube* binaries"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y kubelet kubeadm kubectl
sudo apt-mark hold kubelet kubeadm kubectl

To install kubernetes on the development machine, we can use the following script:

# Install cluster
sudo rm -rf $HOME/.kube
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/etcd
sudo kubeadm init --pod-network-cidr=192.168.0.0/16
mkdir -p $HOME/.kube
sudo cp -i /etc/kubernetes/admin.conf $HOME/.kube/config
sudo chown $(id -u):$(id -g) $HOME/.kube/config
kubectl taint nodes --all node-role.kubernetes.io/master-

# Install calico
curl https://docs.projectcalico.org/manifests/calico.yaml -O
kubectl apply -f calico.yaml
rm -f calico.yaml

If we're already using a script, why not install other requirements as well, such as Helm:

# Install Helm
rm -rf ~/.helm
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/bin/helm
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/master/scripts/get-helm-3 > get_helm.sh
chmod 700 get_helm.sh
./get_helm.sh
rm ./get_helm.sh

And you can go on and add other requirements for your application as part of this cluster, such as metrics server, or anything you might require on the kubernetes cluster.