This tutorial walks you through setting up Kubernetes the hard way. This guide is not for people looking for a fully automated command to bring up a Kubernetes cluster. If that's you then check out Google Kubernetes Engine, or the Getting Started Guides.
Kubernetes The Hard Way is optimized for learning, which means taking the long route to ensure you understand each task required to bootstrap a Kubernetes cluster.
The results of this tutorial should not be viewed as production ready, and may receive limited support from the community, but don't let that stop you from learning!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The target audience for this tutorial is someone planning to support a production Kubernetes cluster and wants to understand how everything fits together, in particular if you want to use a Proxmox hypervisor (or KVM).
Kubernetes The Hard Way guides you through bootstrapping a highly available Kubernetes cluster with end-to-end encryption between components and RBAC authentication.
- kubernetes v1.29.1
- containerd v1.7.13
- coredns v1.11.1
- cni-plugins v1.4.0
- etcd v3.5.12
This tutorial assumes you have access to a Proxmox hypervisor with at least 25GB free RAM and 140GB free HDD/SSD. While a Proxmox server is used for basic infrastructure requirements the lessons learned in this tutorial can be applied to other platforms (ESXi, KVM, VirtualBox, ...).
- Prerequisites
- Installing the Client Tools
- Provisioning Compute Resources
- Provisioning the CA and Generating TLS Certificates
- Generating Kubernetes Configuration Files for Authentication
- Generating the Data Encryption Config and Key
- Bootstrapping the etcd Cluster
- Bootstrapping the Kubernetes Control Plane
- Bootstrapping the Kubernetes Worker Nodes
- Configuring kubectl for Remote Access
- Provisioning Pod Network Routes
- Deploying the DNS Cluster Add-on
- Smoke Test
- Cleaning Up