No BS guide to Kubernetes

Recently due to the huge presence and dominance of Kubernetes as an orchestration tool I decided to take another look at it. I have worked a little bit with Kubernetes back in 2017 but having mostly focused on Development after that I didn't do much with it since then.

Going back to it was a bit of a pain initially as there's so much material around and so much information that it took me longer than I wanted to have a simple initial example setup project with Kubernetes running in my local environment. To mitigate that for others I decided to do this quick article about it.

The focus of this article is running a minimal Kubernetes local setup so you can get a first hands on experience with it. I do not explain the concepts of Kubernetes or Docker in this post.

I plan in the near future to migrate some of my local docker-compose setups to Kubernetes for fun and learning pourposes, so stay tuned, enough intro for now, let's go for it.

Pre-requisites:

Install:

• Docker

• kubectl

• kind

Create kind configuration file and start kind

Create a cofiguration file for kind: kind-config.yml

apiVersion: kind.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4
kind: Cluster
nodes:
- role: control-plane
  extraPortMappings:
  - containerPort: 31111
    hostPort: 31111
    listenAddress: "0.0.0.0" # Optional, defaults to "0.0.0.0"
    protocol: tcp # Optional, defaults to tcp
- role: worker

Now start kind using the config file: kind create cluster --config=kind-config.yml this will start a local docker container containing the Kind kubernetes control plane we will be using, it also exposes a NodePort to your host so you can reach the nginx service we will run in kubernetes next.

Note: This file(kind-config.yml) is required to run local kubernetes Nodeport as described here

Kubernetes configuration files

Create the kubernetes declarative files:

A simple app running in a docker container wrapped in a pod.

Let's use nginx hello demo image. Create a file called:

hello-pod.yml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: hello-pod
  labels:
    app: nginx
spec:
  containers:
    - name: web-nginx
      image: nginxdemos/hello:latest
      ports:
        - containerPort: 80

---

1. A kubernetes nodeport service, create a file called:

svc-config.yml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: nginx-nodeport
spec:
  type: NodePort
  ports:
  - port: 8000
    targetPort: 80
    nodePort: 31111
    protocol: TCP
  selector:
    app: nginx

---

Apply configurations:

kubectl apply -f hello-pod.yml

kubectl apply -f svc-config.yml

You can optionally apply multiple files pointing to a directory so instead of the two commands above you could place those 2 files in a folder for example k8s and then run:

kubectl apply -f k8s

---

Access your running kubernetes setup application, on browser navigate to :

http://localhost You should see it:

Some useful commands:

docker ps -> show running docker containers used by kind to create the kubernetes control plane and worker.

kubectl cluster-info -> display kind cluster info.

kubectl describe svc $svc_name -> describes service

kubectl get pods -> show pod information

kubectl get pods --show-labels

kubectl version --short

kind get clusters -> display kluster names

Delete commands:

kubectl delete pod $pod_name

kubectl delete svc $service_name

kind delete cluster $cluster_name

*This is it, no BS.... it's done! *

AS usual the code and sketch for this article can be found on Github repo

Photo by Ian Taylor on Unsplash