The kube-up.sh script and kops are pretty handy ways to get started using Kubernetes on your platform of choice. However, they're not without flaws and can sometimes run aground when conditions are not just so.
Luckily, since K8's inception, a number of alternative methods for creating clusters have emerged. We'd recommend checking out Minikube in particular, as it's an extremely simple and local development environment that you can use to test out your Kubernetes configuration.
This project can be found here: https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube.
The main limitation for this project is that it only runs a single node, which limits our exploration of certain advanced topics that require multiple machines. Minikube is a great resource for simple or local development however, and can be installed very simply on your Linux VM with the following:
$ curl -Lo minikube https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64 && chmod +x minikube && sudo mv minikube /usr/local/bin/Or install it on macOS with the following:
$ brew cask install minikube
We'll cover how to get started with Minikube with the following commands:
$ minikube start
Starting local Kubernetes v1.7.5 cluster...
Starting VM...
SSH-ing files into VM...
Setting up certs...
Starting cluster components...
Connecting to cluster...
Setting up kubeconfig...
Kubectl is now configured to use the cluster.
You can create a sample deployment quite simply:
$ kubectl run hello-minikube --image=k8s.gcr.io/echoserver:1.4 --port=8080 deployment "hello-minikube" created $ kubectl expose deployment hello-minikube --type=NodePort service "hello-minikube" exposed
Once you have your cluster and service up and running, you can interact with it simply by using the kubectl tool and the context command. You can get to the Minikube dashboard with minikube dashboard.
Additionally, we've already referenced a number of managed services, including GKE, EKS, and Microsoft Azure Container Service (ACS), which provide an automated installation and some managed cluster operations. We will look at a demos of these in Chapter 14, Hardening Kubernetes.