Notes on Building a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes Cluster (Part 3: Installing Kubernetes)

For the first post in this series, see Part 1: the Hardware.

Kubernetes is not famous for simplicity, so when I discovered that Canonical published a curated configuration of Kubernetes that I could install as a single package, microk8s became my system of choice for running my cluster.

I found the installation instructions clear, including some specific configuration required for Raspberry Pi.

I’m using the 1.21/stable channel, so I installed microk8s on each node with:

sudo snap install microk8s --channel=1.21/stable --classic

Next I picked one node to initially configure and went through the next two steps in the docs (“join the group” and “check the status”).

This involved first adding my user to the microk8s group:

sudo usermod -a -G microk8s $USER

(Verify this by running groups — the output should include microk8s)

Then I fixed the permissions on the ~/.kube directory, which was created by microk8s and was initially owned by root.

sudo chown -f -R $USER ~/.kube

Then I started adding nodes to the cluster, following these instructions. Originally I set things up with three nodes, but one thing led to another and now I’m up to nine:

$ kubectl get nodes
NAME       STATUS   ROLES    AGE   VERSION
strange    Ready    <none>   9d    v1.19.7-34+fa60fe11bf77d0
stark      Ready    <none>   19d   v1.19.7-34+fa60fe11bf77d0
murdock    Ready    <none>   15d   v1.19.7-34+fa60fe11bf77d0
vers       Ready    <none>   23h   v1.19.7-34+fa60fe11bf77d0
parker     Ready    <none>   9d    v1.19.7-34+fa60fe11bf77d0
banner     Ready    <none>   9d    v1.19.7-34+fa60fe11bf77d0
romanova   Ready    <none>   9d    v1.19.7-34+fa60fe11bf77d0
fury       Ready    <none>   19d   v1.19.7-34+fa60fe11bf77d0
coulson    Ready    <none>   11d   v1.19.7-34+fa60fe11bf77d0

Next: TLS, Ingress, and the Dashboard