Kubernetes the harder way on clusterhat

Thse are the steps needed to set up a Kubernetes cluster on Clusterhat. "The Cluster HAT (Hardware Attached on Top) which interfaces a (Controller) Raspberry Pi A+/B+/2/3 with 4 Raspberry Pi Zeros configured to use USB Gadget mode is an ideal tool for teaching, testing or simulating small scale clusters." from the Clusterhat website.

I've used the rpiboot image (ClusterHAT-2018-10-13-lite-1-usbboot.zip at the time of this writing) which allows you to use the Pi zeros without sd card.

Setting up Kubernetes is largely based on Kelsey Hightower's Kubernetes The Hard Way.

Important

Due to github's file size limit (and also to keep the transfers fast) I've gzipped most of the files After cloning the repo you can run find . -name *gz -exec gunzip {} + in the clusterhat-kubernetes to get the uncompressed files back

Problems

Kubernetes packages for pi zero don't work (different arm architecture), so we need to compile them
The default kernel does not have the cgroup cpuset support

Set up clusterhat

I've replaced screen with tmux and also added a status script

apt-get install tmux

Edit the /etc/rc.local file by commenting the screen line ad adding the tmux_session.sh call

The tmux_session.sh and rpi_status.sh scripts can be found here

/sbin/clusterhat init
/sbin/clusterhat on
#/usr/bin/screen -c /root/.screenrc -S rpiboot -d -m /usr/bin/rpiboot -m 2000 -d /var/lib/clusterhat/boot/ -o -l -v
/sbin/iptables -I FORWARD -j ACCEPT
/usr/bin/tmux_session.sh

/sbin/iptables -I FORWARD -j ACCEPT is needed because as soon as you install docker, the world ends (not really, but you'll have problems with the pi zeros network connectivity)

Prepare stuff

Kubernetes the Hard Way

If everything goes well you should now have a working Kubernetes cluster

# kubectl  get nodes

NAME         STATUS     ROLES    AGE    VERSION
controller   Ready      master   2d   v1.13.3
p1           Ready      <none>   2d   v1.13.3-dirty
p2           Ready      <none>   2d   v1.13.3-dirty
p3           Ready      <none>   2d   v1.13.3-dirty
p4           Ready      <none>   2d   v1.13.3-dirty

Test it

kubectl run nginx --image=tobi312/rpi-nginx

and scale it

kubectl scale deployments nginx --replicas=3

It won't win any speed contests, but it works.