DEV Community

Cover image for Development cluster with kind
Ashok Nagaraj
Ashok Nagaraj

Posted on • Edited on

Development cluster with kind

#kubernetes #beginners #productivity

Minikube is great but is resource intensive. It has lots of customization options. One can choose between a VM and a Docker container for running a machine, choose from different container runtimes, and more.
Advantages

  • Can run multiple versions of kubernetes
  • Full featured kubernetes
  • Supports local registries with no authorization overheads
  • Lots of documentation and tutorials

Disadvantages

  • Resource heavy (drains my battery in about an hour)
  • One needs to dig-in to customize based on myriad of options

Kind runs kubernetes inside a docker container. Even the kubernetes team uses Kind to test kubernetes itself.

Pros

  • Light weight clusters
  • Super speedy cluster creation (< 1minute)
  • Uses containerd instead of docker-shim
  • Supports sufficient customization

Kind setup
Install kind cli

Configuration
The below configuration is used to create single master, two worker node cluster with ingress enabled. It also exposes ports 80, 443 and 30000 (mapped transparently to localhost).

Note: 30000 can be used for NodePort (check the link below)

❯ cat ${HOME}/kind-config.yaml # three node (two workers) cluster config kind: Cluster apiVersion: kind.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4 nodes: - role: control-plane kubeadmConfigPatches: - | kind: InitConfiguration nodeRegistration: kubeletExtraArgs: node-labels: "ingress-ready=true" extraPortMappings: - containerPort: 30000 hostPort: 30000 listenAddress: "0.0.0.0" protocol: TCP - containerPort: 80 hostPort: 80 protocol: TCP - containerPort: 443 hostPort: 443 protocol: TCP - role: worker - role: worker
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Create the cluster

❯ kind create cluster --name macbook --config ${HOME}/kind-config.yaml Creating cluster "macbook" ... ✓ Ensuring node image (kindest/node:v1.21.1) 🖼 ✓ Preparing nodes 📦 📦 📦 ✓ Writing configuration 📜 ✓ Starting control-plane 🕹️ ✓ Installing CNI 🔌 ✓ Installing StorageClass 💾 ✓ Joining worker nodes 🚜 Set kubectl context to "kind-macbook" You can now use your cluster with: kubectl cluster-info --context kind-macbook Thanks for using kind! 😊 ❯ kubectl get nodes NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION macbook-control-plane Ready control-plane,master 11d v1.21.1 macbook-worker Ready <none> 11d v1.21.1 macbook-worker2 Ready <none> 11d v1.21.1
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Create a pod

❯ kubectl run nginx --image=nginx --port=80 --restart=Never pod/nginx created ❯ kubectl get pods NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE LABELS nginx 1/1 Running 0 63s run=nginx
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Expose the pod as a service

❯ kubectl expose pod/nginx --port=80 service/nginx exposed ❯ kubectl get svc NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE kubernetes ClusterIP 10.96.0.1 <none> 443/TCP 11d nginx ClusterIP 10.96.54.47 <none> 80/TCP 3s ❯ kubectl port-forward svc/nginx 8080:80 Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:8080 -> 80 Forwarding from [::1]:8080 -> 80 ...
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Check the working
Open http://localhost:8080/. You should see the Welcome to nginx page.

Delete the cluster

❯ kind delete cluster --name=macbook Deleting cluster "macbook" ...
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Try more things ...

Top comments (0)