Kubernetes The Hard Way

This tutorial walks you through setting up Kubernetes the hard way on a local machine using a hypervisor. This guide is not for someone looking for a fully automated tool to bring up a Kubernetes cluster. Kubernetes The Hard Way is optimized for learning, which means taking the long route to ensure you understand each task required to bootstrap a Kubernetes cluster.

The results of this tutorial should not be viewed as production ready.

Target Audience

The target audience for this tutorial is someone who wants to understand the fundamentals of Kubernetes and how the core components fit together.

Cluster Details

Kubernetes The Hard Way guides you through bootstrapping a highly available Kubernetes cluster with end-to-end encryption between components and RBAC authentication.

• kubernetes v1.31.2
• etcd v3.5.16
• containerd v1.7.23
• calico-cni v3.29
• coredns v1.9.4

Node configuration

We will be building the following:

• Three control plane nodes (controlplane01, controlplane02 and controlplane03) running the control plane components as operating system services.
• Two worker nodes (node01 and node02)
• One loadbalancer VM running HAProxy to balance requests between the three API servers and provide the endpoint for your KUBECONFIG.

Labs

• Prerequisites
• Provisioning Compute Resources
• Client Tools
• Provisioning the CA and Generating TLS Certificates
• Generating Kubernetes Configuration Files for Authentication
• Generating the Data Encryption Config and Key
• Bootstrapping the etcd Cluster
• Bootstrapping the Kubernetes Control Plane
• Bootstrapping the Kubernetes Worker Nodes
• Configuring kubectl for Remote Access
• Deploy Liferay