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Production-ready mini-Kubernetes installations

Rich Harvest

Article from ADMIN 83/2024

By Martin Loschwitz

Kubernetes can be highly complex, with massive setup routines that are totally over the top for newcomers. If you want to try out Kubernetes or run it in production, you have a number of options, even if you decide not to use the comprehensive packages from established vendors.

No matter what your technical problems, containers make everything easier, better, and faster – at least that's the rosy promise of the glossy brochures. However, some distributors of container platforms that include Kubernetes provide an excellent tool that, once it has been rolled out, keeps on adding components that can quickly overwhelm newcomers with its complexity to cover various missing aspects of container operation.

Each of these components, whether addressed by the tool itself or as an add-on, comes with its own system requirements and drags in other components that also need to be rolled out before anything else happens. The many solutions in a provider's portfolio did not come about by chance but are part of a carefully developed product strategy. The idea is to cover every eventuality, discourage admins from shopping around, and ensure maximum returns.

By the time you have implemented a production-ready Kubernetes (K8s) in this way, you will have paid a large amount of cash to the distributor and your choice of hardware vendor, fought your way through countless pages of documentation, and probably worked for weeks to knock all the add-ons and the tool itself into a production-ready state. It's easy to understand why many admins lose interest in containerization before they have even gotten started.

In this article, I focus on Kubernetes per se and the means for achieving the smallest possible K8s setup that is as complete as possible for a production or development environment.

Basics

Any container platform certainly needs scalable, redundant storage; versatile software-defined networking; and comprehensive security features. The obvious question is: How do you set up Kubernetes without breaking the bank? What options do you have for building an executable Kubernetes that is suitable for production use outside the sphere of influence of the major

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