Exploring the Options

Different ways to set up a cluster

One of the goals of this course is to limit the learning expense to a minimum. This is why we ran the Kubernetes cluster directly on the platform. In this chapter, you will learn how to create a local Kubernetes cluster on your local machine.

There are quite a few ways to set up a local Kubernetes cluster:

• We can, for example, create a few nodes with Vagrant (a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow) and execute quite a few shell commands that would convert them into a Kubernetes cluster.

• We can go even further and create a VirtualBox image that would have all the required software pre-installed and use it to create Vagrant VMs.

• We can also use Ansible to run provisioning of those images as well as to execute all the commands required to join VMs into a cluster.

If we were using Docker Swarm, we’d have Docker for Mac or Windows (or run it natively on Linux) and execute a single docker swarm init command. That’s all that’s needed to create a local Docker Swarm cluster. Can we accomplish the same simplicity with Kubernetes?

The answer is Minikube.