Day: October 28, 2019

In a previous post I talked about k3sup, a tool to easily install k3s on any system available over SSH. If you don’t know what k3s is, it’s a lightweight version of Kubernetes. It also runs on ARMv7 and ARM64 processors. That means it’s also compatible with a Raspberry Pi.

If I am not mistaken, Civo is the first cloud provider that offers a managed k3s service. Just like the other Civo services it is very easy to use. At this point in time, the service is in beta and you need to be accepted to participate.

Deploying the cluster

The cluster can be deployed via the portal, CLI or the REST API. Portal deployment is very simple:

• set a name
• set the size of the nodes
• set the number of nodes

After deployment, you will see the cluster as follows:

Marketplace

Kubernetes on Civo comes with a marketplace of Kubernetes apps to install during or after cluster deployment. By default, Traefik is selected but you can add other apps. I added Helm for instance:

Getting your Kubeconfig

You can use the portal to grab the Kubeconfig file:

Then, in your shell, set the KUBECONFIG environment variable to the path where you downloaded the file. Alternatively, you can use the Civo CLI to obtain the Kubeconfig file.

Deploying an application

Let’s install my image classifier app to the cluster and expose it via Traefik. Let’s look at the Traefik service in the cluster:

If you look closely, you will see that the Traefik service is exposed on each node. Currently, there is no integration with Civo’s load balancers. You do get a DNS name that uses round robin over the IP addresses of the nodes. The DNS name is something like 232b548e-897f-41d3-86f6-1a2a38516a58.k8s.civo.com.

Let’s install and expose my image classifier with the following basic YAML:

apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: nasnet-ingress
  namespace: default
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: traefik
spec:
  rules:
  - host: IPADDRESS.nip.io
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /
        backend:
          serviceName: nasnet-svc
          servicePort: 80
---
kind: Service
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: nasnet-svc
spec:
  selector:
    app: nasnet
  ports:
  - protocol: TCP
    port: 80
    targetPort: 9090
  type: ClusterIP
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: nasnet-app
  labels:
    app: nasnet
spec:
  replicas: 2
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: nasnet
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: nasnet
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: nasnet
        image: gbaeke/nasnet
        resources:
          limits:
            cpu: "0.5"
          requests:
            cpu: "0.2"
        ports:
        - containerPort: 9090

In the above YAML, replace IPADDRESS with one of the IP addresses of your nodes. With a little help of nip.io, that name will resolve to the IP address that you specify.

The result:

Conclusion

This was just a quick look at Civo’s Kubernetes service. It is easy to install and comes with an easy to use marketplace to quickly get started. In a relatively short time, they were able to get this up and running quickly. I am sure it will rapidly evolve into a great contender to the other managed Kubernetes services out there.