Kubernetes Hack Night

Hack Night on the 1st June 2017. Playing around with Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform.

Google Cloud Setup

• Create an account and project on Google Cloud Platform
  • NB: You will need to enter payment details, though new accounts are given $300 credits on the platform for the next 12 months and it will not charge after this period (according to Google). However, we recommend that you take precautions and destroy your cluster after you are finished.
• Navigate to the Google Container Engine dashboard in the Products & services navigation pane on the left hand side.
• Click the 'Create Cluster' button to open the cluster creation wizard.
  • Don't worry about most of the fields on this form, just give it a name and set the amount of nodes to 5 or less(6+ starts to charge you) and click 'Create'.

Local Setup

• Install Google Cloud SDK
  • Move the SDK somewhere sensible (and make sure your user is the owner of its parent folder). e.g. your home folder ~/google-cloud-sdk
  • Run the install.sh script from the Google Cloud SDK folder to add the gcloud command to your PATH
• Run gcloud components install kubectl to install the Kubernetes CLI
• Run gcloud init to login to your Google Cloud Platform account. If it asks you to configure the Google Compute Engine, you don't need to do this.
• Open the Google Cloud Console, navigate to your cluster in the Container Engine, click the checkbox and then the 'Connect' button that appears. This should then prompt you with a command to configure kubectl with your cluster. (It should look something like gcloud container clusters get-credentials cluster-1 \ --zone europe-west1-c --project <project_id>)
• Run kubectl proxy, then navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8001/ui to see the Kubernetes dashboard.

Useful stuff

• Kubernetes by Example
• kubectl cheatsheet

Hack away!

So you've setup your lovely cluster and you're happy that it's stable. Let's have a play around. Each challenge comes with a YAML configuration file for the final resources created.

You can watch your pods going up and down with the following command:

kubectl get pods -w --all-namespaces

Challenges

• Challenge 1
• Challenge 2
• Challenge 3

Next Steps

Some ideas on things to look at next:

• Helm/Package Management
• Monitoring

Resources

• Tools
• Tutorials
• Platforms
• Community
• Monitoring