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Deploy Kubernetes Clusters to vSphere with CAPV 0.6.0

So you spent a week putting together a two part blog post for how to deploy clusters using Cluster API Provider vSphere. You feel pretty good about yourself, right? Well guess what, a new version of CAPV is right around the corner so you better update that blog post!! Well that’s why we’re here, things move fast in the world of Kubernetes…

With the release of Cluster API v1alphav3, the CAPV team has also released a new build of CAPV (0.6.0) with support for v1alpha3. You can review all of the changes from alpha2 to alpha3 here but the main change we’ll look at in this blog post is the creation of the management cluster and workload clusters with clusterctl and how that is different in v1alpha3.

In my previous series of posts on using CAPV to deploy Kubernetes clusters to vSphere environments, I specifically dealt with some of the requirements to support this type of deployment in VMware Cloud on AWS. I won’t be rehashing all of that in this post so feel free to refer to the original posts if you’d like to learn the specifics of deploying clusters to VMC with CAPV.

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Kubernetes Cluster Creation in VMware Cloud on AWS with CAPV: Part 2

In Part 1 of my series on deploying Kubernetes clusters to VMware on AWS environments with ClusterAPI Provider vSphere, I detailed the processes required to stand up the CAPV management plane. After completing those steps, I am ready to provision a workload cluster to VMC using CAPV.

Creating Workload Clusters

The CAPV cluster is the brains of the operations but I still need to deploy some workload clusters for my teams of developers to deploy their applications onto. The management cluster helps automate the provisioning of all of the provider components to support my workload clusters as well as instantiating the VMs provisioned as a Kubernetes cluster. The basic use case here is that I, as the infrastructure admin, am responsible for utilizing the CAPV management cluster to provision multiple workload clusters that can support individual teams of developers, individual application deployments, etc. The CAPV management cluster allows me to easily deploy a consistent cluster in a repeatable fashion with very little manual effort. I can quickly deploy a test, dev, prod set of clusters for a team or deploy 5 different workload clusters for 5 different groups of developers.

Continue reading “Kubernetes Cluster Creation in VMware Cloud on AWS with CAPV: Part 2”

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Kubernetes Cluster Creation in VMware Cloud on AWS with CAPV: Part 1

One of the biggest challenges in starting a Cloud Native practice is understanding how to establish a repeatable and consistent method of deploying and managing Kubernetes clusters. That’s where ClusterAPI comes in handy!! ClusterAPI (CAPI) is a Kubernetes project to bring declarative, Kubernetes-style APIs to cluster creation, configuration, and management. It provides optional, additive functionality on top of core Kubernetes to manage the lifecycle of a Kubernetes cluster. Now you can use Kubernetes to create more Kubernetes!!!!

ClusterAPI is responsible for provisioning all of the infrastructure required to support a Kubernetes cluster. CAPI also provides the ability to perform Day2 operations, such as scaling and upgrading clusters. Most importantly, it provides a consistent management plane to perform these actions on multiple clusters. In fact, ClusterAPI is a big part of what will allow VI admins to orchestrate and automate the provisioning of Kubernetes clusters natively as a part of vSphere with Project Pacific. Learn more about the Project Pacific architecture and how it utilizes ClusterAPI here.

Continue reading “Kubernetes Cluster Creation in VMware Cloud on AWS with CAPV: Part 1”