So, as you may know about me, I’ve got a strong interest in open-source software. It’s fun: pull something for free, break it, get a new one. Free as in free beer appeals to my senses. And the horror of spending an extra hundred on a Windows license is serious. I hope my family enjoys using Mint Linux for the rest of our earthly lives.
One of the hot new bits in Linux is containers: as in Docker. And the white-hot green-newest bit of that is Kubernetes, or k8s if you’re cool. I first heard about it after downloading Docker and checking out its bleeding-edge features: now it’s become more mainstream.
For quite a while I’d wanted to start doing local stuff with it. You can spin up a singular k8s node on your local laptop, but it’s designed to work as a gang, so it’s better if you have 3 at once. But who has 3 laptops? Who wants to spend a cool thousand buying a hat trick’s worth of tiny NUCs? Read the first paragraph again folks: I am cheap.
Thankfully, these things are friendly to virtualization, and I do have a few spare old machines lying about gathering dust. So I haggled for an old SSD, threw all the RAM together, installed Fossa, and managed to get this script together from the original authors. Hint: the instruction is a little out-of-date, so I had to fix a few links.
https://github.com/jharter1/k8s_on_vagrant
What will this do to me, you ask? Assuming you have Ansible & Vagrant installed, when you type in vagrant up it should spin up 3 virtual nodes with a collection of pods running on each of them. Then you can do whatever the heck you want with it; the options are quite unlimited.
It’s hard for me to illustrate how cool this seems, but just so you know, it feels really cool. Let me know if you like it, have any questions, or have ideas for improvement!