Create an easy kubernetes cluster using kind and docker on your workstation

Assuming that you want to have a quick way to spawn up a kubernetes cluster for some development work all you need to do is to have docker desktop installed and install kind app on your computer. I will not go through the installation process as it is very well described in here.

Once you have docker up and running and kind installed all you need to do is to open up your terminal and run the following:

#kind create cluster --name <some name>
Creating cluster "<some name>" ...
✓ Ensuring node image (kindest/node:v1.21.1) 🖼 
✓ Preparing nodes 📦  
✓ Writing configuration 📜 
✓ Starting control-plane 🕹️ 
✓ Installing CNI 🔌 
✓ Installing StorageClass 💾 
Set kubectl context to "kind-<some name>"
You can now use your cluster with:

kubectl cluster-info --context kind-<some name>

Have a question, bug, or feature request? Let us know! https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/#community 🙂

Few minutes later your kubernetes cluster is up and running and you can start working. However this will create you only a single node cluster that has one control-plane node. You can activate it by using the command from the output of the cluster creation command. The output will look something like this:

#kubectl cluster-info --context kind-<some name>
Kubernetes control plane is running at https://127.0.0.1:64000
CoreDNS is running at https://127.0.0.1:64000/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns:dns/proxy

To further debug and diagnose cluster problems, use 'kubectl cluster-info dump'.

After this you can list the nodes:

#kubectl get nodes -o wide
NAME                     STATUS   ROLES                  AGE     VERSION   INTERNAL-IP   EXTERNAL-IP   OS-IMAGE       KERNEL-VERSION     CONTAINER-RUNTIME
<some name>-control-plane   Ready    control-plane,master   6m45s   v1.21.1   172.19.0.6    <none>        Ubuntu 21.04   5.10.76-linuxkit   containerd://1.5.2

If you want a bit more complex installation then we need to create a simple config file in YAML format that will look like this:

#cat cluster.yaml
kind: Cluster
apiVersion: kind.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4
name: test
nodes:
- role: control-plane
- role: worker
- role: worker
- role: worker

This will create a 4 node cluster with one control-plane node and 3 worker nodes.

Now we can deploy the cluster by running the following command:

#kind create cluster --config cluster.yaml
Creating cluster "test" ...
 ✓ 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-test"
You can now use your cluster with:

kubectl cluster-info --context kind-test

Have a nice day! 👋

Now the cluster is ready to be used. If you are checking the cluster you will see that this time you have a 4 node cluster up and running.

#kubectl get nodes -o wide
NAME                 STATUS   ROLES                  AGE     VERSION   INTERNAL-IP   EXTERNAL-IP   OS-IMAGE       KERNEL-VERSION     CONTAINER-RUNTIME
test-control-plane   Ready    control-plane,master   2m36s   v1.21.1   172.19.0.10   <none>        Ubuntu 21.04   5.10.76-linuxkit   containerd://1.5.2
test-worker          Ready    <none>                 119s    v1.21.1   172.19.0.7    <none>        Ubuntu 21.04   5.10.76-linuxkit   containerd://1.5.2
test-worker2         Ready    <none>                 119s    v1.21.1   172.19.0.9    <none>        Ubuntu 21.04   5.10.76-linuxkit   containerd://1.5.2
test-worker3         Ready    <none>                 116s    v1.21.1   172.19.0.8    <none>        Ubuntu 21.04   5.10.76-linuxkit   containerd://1.5.2

Note: To be able to interface with the cluster you will have to install the cli tools like kubectl and helm and many others that you will want to use.