Kubernetes on Windows
April 6, 2020 - 7 mins read time - 1467 words - garrardkitchen
This post is a reminder to me of what needs to be installed in order for a pod, created from a local image, that is to be served up via a kubernetes cluster, to be run from your local development environment.
What is Kubernetes and why is it so important?
“Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available.”
So why is Kubernetes important?
“Containers are a good way to bundle and run your applications. In a production environment, you need to manage the containers that run the applications and ensure that there is no downtime. For example, if a container goes down, another container needs to start. Wouldn’t it be easier if this behavior was handled by a system?
That’s how Kubernetes comes to the rescue! Kubernetes provides you with a framework to run distributed systems resiliently. It takes care of scaling and failover for your application, provides deployment patterns, and more. For example, Kubernetes can easily manage a canary deployment for your system.”
Kubernetes is the community’s (has a much larger community than that of Swarm's community) choice of container orchestrators.
Some important notices
Permissions
To install kubectl and minikube you must start Powershell with Administrator permissions
Shell
These settings will only viable for the current shell, if you need to run another shell, ensure the minikube docker-env commands in the Steps to take to configure your environment section are also executed in the new shell. As minikube is the tool that runs a local cluster in your development environment, we need to tell it to use it’s built-in docker daemon and have images pulled from there, and not from a container registry.
How do I install kubectl (and what the heck is it)?
kubectl is a CLI (command line interface) tool for controlling Kubernetes clusters. You can use this tool to deploy applications, inspect and manage cluster resources and view logs.
To ease the installation process, use chocolatey to install kubernetes-cli, run:
PS C:\> choco install kubernetes-cli
How do I install minikube (and what the heck is it)?
Minikube implements a local Kubernetes cluster and is deemed the best tool for local Kubernetes application development.
To ease the installation process, use chocolatey to install minikube, run:
PS C:\> choco install minikube
Before you start, you must ensure that you have a platform virtualisation system available. Platform virtualisation software provides the mechanism to run virtual machines and containers in isolation and exposes them to one or more networks. It is within a virtual machine that your Kubernetes cluster will run. Windows 10 comes with a virtualisation hypervisor feature called hyper-v. You need to ensure it is running first. To do this, run:
PS C:\> Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V -All
PS C:\> minikube start --driver hyperv
* minikube v1.9.1 on Microsoft Windows 10 Enterprise 10.0.18363 Build 18363
* Using the hyperv driver based on user configuration
* Downloading VM boot image ...
> minikube-v1.9.0.iso.sha256: 65 B / 65 B [--------------] 100.00% ? p/s 0s
> minikube-v1.9.0.iso: 174.93 MiB / 174.93 MiB [ 100.00% 1.03 MiB p/s 2m51s
* Starting control plane node m01 in cluster minikube
* Creating hyperv VM (CPUs=2, Memory=6000MB, Disk=20000MB) ...
* Preparing Kubernetes v1.18.0 on Docker 19.03.8 ...
* Enabling addons: default-storageclass, storage-provisioner
* Done! kubectl is now configured to use "minikube"
Steps to take to configure your environment
To set up your minikube environment, run:
PS C:\> minikube docker-env
$Env:DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY = "1"
$Env:DOCKER_HOST = "tcp://192.168.75.126:2376"
$Env:DOCKER_CERT_PATH = "C:\Users\garrard.kitchen\.minikube\certs"
$Env:MINIKUBE_ACTIVE_DOCKERD = "minikube"
# To point your shell to minikube's docker-daemon, run:
# & minikube -p minikube docker-env | Invoke-Expression
To point your shell to minikube’s docker-daemon, run:
PS C:\> minikube docker-env | Invoke-Expression
To get access to minikube’s dashboard, run:
PS C:\> minikube.exe dashboard
* Verifying dashboard health ...
* Launching proxy ...
* Verifying proxy health ...
* Opening http://127.0.0.1:54553/api/v1/namespaces/kubernetes-dashboard/services/http:kubernetes-dashboard:/proxy/ in your default browser...
Here’s some sample nodejs (server.js) code. It starts a server on port 8080:
var http = require('http');
var handleRequest = function (request, response) {
console.log('Received request for URL: ' + request.url);
response.writeHead(200);
response.end('Hello World!');
};
console.log("started")
var www = http.createServer(handleRequest);
www.listen(8080);
Here’s a Dockerfile for the above nodejs server. Please observe that it exposes port 8080. This ensures that network TCP traffic can be received by the container via port 8080.
FROM node:13.5.0
EXPOSE 8080
COPY server.js .
CMD [ "node", "server.js" ]
To build a image of the above Dockerfile, run:
PS C:\> docker build -t hello-world:1 .
Include a build tag
You must specify a version tag and it has to be something other than latest. Here, I have used 1. If you don’t follow these instructions, minikube will attempt to pull the image from a docker registry (normally DockerHub).
To check that the image exists in Minikube’s built-in Docker daemon, run:
PS C:\> minikube ssh
$ docker images
You should see something similar to this:
$ minikube ssh
_ _
_ _ ( ) ( )
___ ___ (_) ___ (_)| |/') _ _ | |_ __
/' _ ` _ `\| |/' _ `\| || , < ( ) ( )| '_`\ /'__`\
| ( ) ( ) || || ( ) || || |\`\ | (_) || |_) )( ___/
(_) (_) (_)(_)(_) (_)(_)(_) (_)`\___/'(_,__/'`\____)
$ docker images
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
hello-world 1 55f40b7f5c32 13 days ago 660MB
hello-world latest 50c4285f25a5 13 days ago 660MB
nginx latest ed21b7a8aee9 2 weeks ago 127MB
k8s.gcr.io/kube-proxy v1.18.0 43940c34f24f 3 weeks ago 117MB
k8s.gcr.io/kube-scheduler v1.18.0 a31f78c7c8ce 3 weeks ago 95.3MB
k8s.gcr.io/kube-apiserver v1.18.0 74060cea7f70 3 weeks ago 173MB
k8s.gcr.io/kube-controller-manager v1.18.0 d3e55153f52f 3 weeks ago 162MB
kubernetesui/dashboard v2.0.0-rc6 cdc71b5a8a0e 5 weeks ago 221MB
k8s.gcr.io/pause 3.2 80d28bedfe5d 2 months ago 683kB
k8s.gcr.io/coredns 1.6.7 67da37a9a360 2 months ago 43.8MB
kindest/kindnetd 0.5.3 aa67fec7d7ef 5 months ago 78.5MB
k8s.gcr.io/etcd 3.4.3-0 303ce5db0e90 5 months ago 288MB
kubernetesui/metrics-scraper v1.0.2 3b08661dc379 5 months ago 40.1MB
gcr.io/k8s-minikube/storage-provisioner v1.8.1 4689081edb10 2 years ago 80.8MB
To run this image as a pod, run:
PS C:\> kubectl run hello-world --image=hello-world:1 --port=8080 --image-pull-policy=never
pod/hello-world created
The --image-pull-policy=never is telling Kubectl to use the local image and not one from a container registry (Docker, ACR, ECR, GCP)
To expose this port for external access (from browser) from outside of the cluster, run:
PS C:\> kubectl expose pod hello-world --type=LoadBalancer
service "hello-world" exposed
To confirm your service is running and to get the port number of this exposed service, run:
PS C:\> kubectl get services
NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE
hello-world LoadBalancer 10.111.126.10 <pending> 8080:31589/TCP 45h
kubernetes ClusterIP 10.96.0.1 <none> 443/TCP 2d16h
You will see the <pending> state of your LoadBalancer if you do not have not a Load Balancer integrated with your cluster. For your local development environment, it is nothing to worry about.
You will see that the hello-world service is accessible via port 8080. However, we still don’t know behind what IPv4 address, this services is available. To get the IPv4 address of your cluster, you type:
PS C:\> minikube ip
192.168.75.126
Finally, to access your service, run the cURL command, using the minikube ip address and the TCP port as listed in the kubectl get services output:
PS C:\> curl "http://192.168.75.126:31589" -UseBasicParsing
StatusCode : 200
StatusDescription : OK
Content : {72, 101, 108, 108...}
RawContent : HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: keep-alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Mon, 06 Apr 2020 13:05:42 GMT
Hello World!
Headers : {[Connection, keep-alive], [Transfer-Encoding, chunked], [Date, Mon, 06 Apr 2020 13:05:42 GMT]}
RawContentLength : 12
You can also use minikube to obtain your service’s url. To do this, run:
PS C:\> minikube service hello-world --url
http://192.168.75.126:31589
Useful kubectl commands
This first command is important. Some background first…a context is a group of access parameters. Each context contains a Kubernetes cluster, a user, and a namespace. When you are working with multiple contexts off of your development machine, you may run into compatibility issues due to your client version not being compatible with the server API version. All kubectl commands will run against the current context. To check your client version, run:
PS C:\> kubectl version --client
Client Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"18", GitVersion:"v1.18.0", GitCommit:"9e991415386e4cf155a24b1da15becaa390438d8", GitTreeState:"clean", BuildDate:"2020-03-25T14:58:59Z", GoVersion:"go1.13.8", Compiler:"gc", Platform:"windows/amd64"}
To ascertain your current context, run:
PS C:\> kubectl config current-context
minikube
To list all of your configured contexts, run:
PS C:\> kubectl config get-contexts
CURRENT NAME CLUSTER AUTHINFO NAMESPACE
docker-desktop docker-desktop docker-desktop
docker-for-desktop docker-desktop docker-desktop
* minikube minikube minikube
The * next to minikube indicates that minikube is your current context.
If you are configured to access a cluster hosted from a cloud provider such as Azure, then this context will also be listed.
To use a specific context, run:
PS C:\> kubectl config use-context docker-for-desktop