Kubernetes on Route179

NKE lab series – Ep3: Deep dive into NKE networking with Calico CNI

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 20:11:10 +0000

This is the 3rd episode of our NKE lab series. Previously, I have walked through:

How to deploy a NKE-enabled Kubernetes cluster in a nested Nutanix CE environment
How to provide persistent storage to your NKE clusters using 2x Nutanix CSI options

In this episode, we’ll deep dive into the NKE networking spaces by exploring the following:

PART-1: Exploring Calico CNI deployment models within a NKE cluster
PART-2: Applying standard Kubernetes network policy in a NKE cluster
PART-3: Leveraging Calico specific policies in a NKE cluster

pre-requisites

a 1-node or 3-node Nutanix CE 2.0 cluster deployed in nested virtualization depending on your lab compute capacity, as documented here and here
a NKE-enabled K8s cluster deployed in Nutanix CE (see Ep1)
a Guestbook demo app deployed onto the NKE cluster (see Ep2)
a lab network environment supports VLAN tagging and provides basic infra services such as AD, DNS, NTP etc (these are required when installing the CE cluster)
a Linux/Mac workstation for managing the Kubernetes cluster, with Kubectl installed

PART-1: Exploring Calico CNI models in NKE

Calico is recognized as the most popular CNI plugins within he Kubernetes community, and it has been widely deployed in production thanks to its reliable performance and comprehensive networking and security features.

NKE lab series – Ep2: Deploy a multi-tier web application on a NKE cluster using persistent storage with Nutanix CSI

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 13:50:58 +0000

This is the 2nd episode of our NKE lab series. In the 1st episode, I have demonstrated how you can easily deploy an enterprise-grade NKE cluster in a Nutanix CE lab environment with nested virtualization.

In this episode, we’ll deploy a containerized multi-tier web application onto our NKE cluster, by leveraging the built-in Nutanix CSI driver to provide persistent storage for the demo app.

Specifically, we’ll explore 2x Nutanix CSI options:

Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (NKE) lab series – Ep1: Create a NKE-enabled Kubernetes Cluster on Nutanix Community Edition (CE)

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 09:15:47 +0000

This blog is the 1st episode of a Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (NKE) home lab series. In this post, I will walk through the detailed process of deploying an enterprise-ready NKE-enabled Kubernetes cluster within a Nutanix CE environment.

Nutanix CE is a free version of Nutanix AOS, which powers the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform. It is designed for people interested in test driving Nutanix platform features and capabilities in a non-production or PoC environment. Even better, Nutanix CE also works in a nested virtualization deployment on top of ESXi/vSphere. This makes it perfect for hands-on testing or exploring in a safe environment such as home-lab, which is exactly what I’m running here!

Enabling embedded Harbor Image Registry in vSphere 7 with Kubernetes

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 14:11:26 +0000

This will be a quick blog to demonstrate how to enable the (embedded) Harbor Image Registry in vSphere 7 with Kubernetes. Harbor was originally developed by VMware as a enterprise-grade private container registry. It was then donated to the CNCF in 2018 and recently became a CNCF graduated project.

For this demo, we’ll activate the embedded Harbor register within the vSphere 7 Kubernetes environment, and integrate it with the Supervisor Cluster for container management and deployment.

Deploying Contour Ingress Controller on Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG)

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 21:15:59 +0000

This blog provides a guide to help you deploying Contour Ingress Controller onto a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) cluster. Contour is an open source Kubernetes ingress controller that exposes HTTP/HTTPS routes for internal services so they are reachable from outside the cluster. Like many other ingress controllers, Contour can provide advanced L7 URL/URI based routing and load balancing, as well as SSL/TLS termination capabilities.

Contour was originally developed by Heptio (VMware) and has been recently handed over to CNCF as an incubating project. Contour consists of a control plane that is provisioned via a K8s deployment, and an Envoy-based data plane running as a Daemonset on every cluster worker node.

Deploying vSphere 7 with Kubernetes and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster

Fri, 17 Jul 2020 17:55:15 +0000

In this post we’ll explore the vSphere 7 with Kubernetes capabilities and the detailed deployment steps in order to provision a vSphere supervisor cluster and a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) cluster.

If you are new to vSphere 7 and Tanzu Kubernetes, below are some background readings that can be used as a good start point:

Requirements

Cloud Native DevOps on GCP Series Ep2 – Create a CI/CD pipeline with GKE, GCR and Cloud Build

Tue, 09 Jun 2020 10:13:00 +0000

This is the second episode of our **Cloud Native DevOps on GCP **series. In the previous chapter, we have built a multi-AZ GKE cluster with Terraform. This time, we’ll create a cloud native CI/CD pipeline leveraging our GKE cluster and Google DevOps tools such as Cloud Build and Google Container Registry (GCR). We’ll create a Cloud Build trigger by connecting to GitHub repository to perform automatic build, test and deployment of a sample micro-service app onto the GKE cluster.

Cloud Native DevOps on GCP Series Ep1 – Build a GKE Cluster with Terraform

Tue, 09 Jun 2020 10:12:59 +0000

This is the first episode of our Cloud Native DevOps on GCP series. Here we’ll be building an Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster using Terraform. From my personal experience, GKE has been one of the most scalable and reliable managed Kubernetes solution, and it’s also 100% upstream compliant and certified by CNCF.

For this demo I have provided a sample Terraform script at here. The target state will look like this: