Creating a Cluster

As always, we will need a cluster. However, this time, it is going to be a bit better defined than before. In the previous section, we gained some insights that should help us create a more robust cluster. It will be regional and scalable. Or, to be more precise, it will be like that if that’s possible.

Note for Minikube and Docker Desktop users

If you’re using Docker Desktop or Minikube, it will not be regional nor scalable because those are single-node clusters. Nobody’s perfect.

Istio Ingress Gateway

Just remember that, no matter how you create the cluster, we will need the INGRESS_PORT variable with the Istio Ingress Gateway address. That, as you can probably guess, means that the cluster should have Istio up-and-running.

Gists for different Kubernetes flavors

Gists with the commands to create and destroy a Kubernetes cluster are as follows.

• Docker Desktop with Istio
• Minikube with Istio
• Regional and scalable GKE with Istio
• Regional and scalable EKS with Istio
• Regional and scalable AKS with Istio

Now that we have a cluster, we’ll deploy our demo application. And, after that, we’ll be able to run some experiments. This time, we will not run them for the sake of exploring new ways to destroy stuff. Instead, we’ll run experiments so that we can gather some data which we’ll use to generate reports.

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The next lesson will contain the instructions for deploying the demo application.