While preparing the CKA exam, I have been using minikube and kubeadm or Rancher’s rke to bootstrap kubernetes clusters. Those tools are very nice but I wanted to understand all the details of a full setup. The best for this is the excellent “Kubernetes The Hard Way” tutorial from Kelsey Hightower.

I wanted to do the setup on-premises, meaning no cloud provider. So I had to “adapt” the tutorial accordingly. As I have spent some time getting everything up and running, I have decided to share my experience through a series of posts.

The tutorial is using VMs, but should be applicable any non cloud setup like bare metal or other.

This is just an adaptation of the guide and a sharing of my experience, which I hope will be helpful to others.

At the end of this guide, you will have a HA Kubernetes 1.10.1 up and running with containerd 1.1.0, Weave Net 2.3.0 and CoreDNS 1.1.1.

The tutorial is organized in the following steps:

1. Planning the Installation
2. Provisioning TLS certificates
3. Generating Kubeconfig files
4. Generating the Data Encryption Config
5. Bootstrapping etcd Cluster
6. Bootstrapping k8s Control Plane
7. Bootstrapping k8s Worker Nodes
8. Generating kubectl config file
9. Configuring Networking
10. Deploying Cluster Add-ons
11. Kubernetes Cluster Conformance

On-Premises Kubernetes Step by Step