Tag: civo

k3sup is a utility created by Alex Ellis to easily deploy k3s to any local or remote VM. In this post, I am giving the tool a try on a Civo cloud Ubuntu VM. You can of course pick any cloud provider you want or use a local system.

Deploying a VM on Civo Cloud

There’s not much to say here. Civo cloud is super simple to use and deploys VMs very fast. Just get an account and launch a new instance. Make sure you can access the VM over SSH. I deployed a simple Ubuntu 18.04 VM with 2 GBs of RAM:

Note: make sure you enable SSH via private/public key pair; use ssh-keygen to create the key pair and upload the contents of id_rsa.pub to Civo (SSH Keys section)

After deployment, check that you can access the VM with ssh chosen-user@IP-of-VM

Getting k3sup

On my Windows box, I used the Ubuntu shell to install k3sup:

curl -sLS https://get.k3sup.dev | sh 
sudo install k3sup /usr/local/bin/ 

You can now run the k3sup command as follows:

k3sup install --ip PUBLIC-IP-OF-CLOUD-VM --user root

And off it goes…

At the end of the installation, you will see:

Saving file to: /home/gbaeke/kubeconfig

This means you can now use kubectl to interact with k3s. Just make sure kubectl knows where to find your kubeconfig file with (in my case in /home/gbaeke):

export KUBECONFIG=/home/gbaeke/kubeconfig

Before continuing, make sure your cloud VM allows access to TCP port 6443!

Now you can run something like kubectl get nodes:

Installing applications

k3sup allows you to install the following applications to k3s via k3sup app install:

• openfaas
• metrics-server
• inlets-operator
• cert-manager

To install OpenFaas, just run k3sup app install openfaas. And off it goes….

To install other applications, just use YAML files or any other method you prefer. It’s still Kubernetes! 😊

Conclusion

This was just a quick post (or note to self 😊) about k3sup which allows you to install k3s to any VM over SSH. It really is a great and simple to use tool so highly recommended. Note that Civo has a k3s service as well which is currently in beta. That service makes it easy to provision k3s from the Civo portal, similar to how you deploy AKS or GKE!