This post continues looking at my process of learning more about Kubernetes. I’ve been working through the 50 days of Kubernetes (K8s). I completed the first 3 sections (Days 1-15). This starts the look at Days 16-20
Disclosure: I actually ran a kubenetes cluster in Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), but just using scripts from Andrew Pruski.
Starting to work with Kubernetes
Setting up Kubernetes is cumbersome. The setup and configuration is a little daunting but this look gives you a quick start. Microsoft is working with Katacoda here to run some things in the browser. I’m guessing they have some virtual environment you can use to get things running here.
When clicking the Day 16, we start with the welcome course that launches a single node Kubernetes Cluster.
When you start the scenario, you get the course on the left and a terminal on the right. If you click a section of code (like minicube version), it will run this in the terminal.
I typed most of the commands to get a feeling for the work. It’s definitely some work here, and lots of commands. I think I’d prefer to let Azure or AWS run this for me, but I guess I’ll still admin some of it.
The first course gets you a cluster with minikube. The second course lets you set up a two node cluster, which is a little more interesting. After all, the idea here is that you want a whole series of machines to act as a cluster of nodes. The process to join nodes is with a token, at least here it is. There can be other authentication if you really do this.
Continuing through the course across a few days, I got a feeling for how to join new nodes and change the configuration of the Kubernetes cluster. For the most part, I have a general idea of how to set up new nodes, access tokens, etc. While I don’t really know how or why to make changes, I do at least understand what changes are possible.
I did run the “get nodes” or “get pods” a few times, seeing the different messages as new containers/pods were being created, noting the delays as things are deployed. I also learned that the containers distributed on the nodes are shown under the Docker command CLI. That is interesting and unexpected to me, though it shouldn’t have been.
One thing to be aware of when trying to access the dashboard is that the token copy needs to be with a right click. At least for me, CTRL+C didn’t work.
I even re-ran a few deployments, adding new pods and web servers to the deployment, which was interesting to me.
Working through scenarios
In this course, there were 17 different scenarios. Adding volumes, networking, stateful services, building deployments, etc. Even using Helm.
For most of these, I’d click the code to run it, and read through the results, seeing how this works. The actual details of creating a secret and retrieving is aren’t likely things I’ll remember, More, I’m just trying to understand how things work.
The different scenarios do give you an idea of the breadth of Kubernetes capabilities. Certainly if you need to do these things, it would to go through the course, maybe even changing around some parameters. I’d suggest you go through this if you’ll be deploying systems and applications.