Install Jenkins X in an Existing Kubernetes Cluster

I will assume that your cluster passed compliance tests, or if you did not execute them, that you are confident that it works according to Kubernetes specifications and best practices. Also, I’m assuming that it is accessible from the outside world. To be more precise, the cluster needs to be reachable from GitHub, so that it can send webhook notifications whenever we push code changes. Please note that the accessibility requirement is valid only for the purpose of the exercises. In a real-world situation you might use a Git server that is inside your network (e.g., GitLab, BitBucket, GitHub Enterprise, etc.).

Installing Jenkins X in an existing Kubernetes cluster

Now that we have run the compliance tests that showed our cluster complies with Kubernetes, we can install Jenkins X.

IP address

We’ll need a few pieces of information before we install the tools we need. The first in line is the IP address.

Typically, your cluster should be accessible through an external load balancer. Assuming that we can guarantee its availability, an external load balancer provides a stable entry point (IP address) to the cluster. Its job is to ensure that the requests are forwarded to one of the healthy nodes of the cluster. That is, more or less, all we need an external load balancer for.

If you do have an external LB, please get its IP address. If you don’t, you can use the IP address of one of the worker nodes of the cluster, as long as you understand that a failure of that node would make everything inaccessible.

Please replace [...] with the IP of your load balancer or one of the worker nodes before you execute the command that follows.