minicluster

Documentation of a mini bare-metal cluster intended for Kubernetes experiments. It consists in 6 nodes (X86_64 architecture) managed by a server node providing global services (DNS, etc.). The whole cluster fits in a case and is therefore portable.

Day-to-day information on the cluster is available on my blog.

Building

All information related to hardware is gathered in a dedicated page.

OS deployment configuration

Initial plan was to deploy CentOS 8 stream using

The Foreman provisioning tool for nodes life cycle management
Underlying configuration (TFTP, etc.) to enable The Foreman to deploy OS by kickstart files through PXE boot.

As I discovered that cluster nodes couldn't boot with PXE, The Foreman can be removed and deployment is not automated for now. Stay tuned.

Gateway configuration and global network services

A dedicated page gathers information on gateway configuration.

Global cluster configuration

As much as possible, and once public keys of management accounts have been deployed on nodes, global configuration is done using Ansible scripts

Kubernetes deployment

Container deployment

The selected container technology is CRI-O to avoid turmoils around Docker. Details are gathered in a dedicated page.