Installing Kubernetes on MicroK8s

MicroK8S

We recommend installing microk8s on top of any Ubuntu distribution as it is well maintained by the ubuntu community. Other distributions may also be supported.

Start by downloading kubernetes from microk8s official site: https://microk8s.io/docs/getting-started

Once you have a running instance, make sure to enable the required plugins:

StorageClass: Enable a basic storage class provider by enabling the plugin
```
microk8s enable hostpath-storage
```
CoreDNS: This service is not provisioned by default. Run the following command to enable it
```
microk8s enable dns
```

Ingress Controller: This distribution has an easy way of installing this plugin by running:

microk8s enable ingress

Once the ingress controller is installed, apply this patch to allow mutual TLS connections to go through the nginx controller

microk8s kubectl -n ingress patch ds nginx-ingress-microk8s-controller --type=json -p='[{"op": "add", "path": "/spec/template/spec/containers/0/args/-", "value": "--enable-ssl-passthrough"}]'

CertManager: To enable the plugin run:
```
microk8s enable cert-manager
```

MicroK8s embeds two main subcommands that will be used later on, it is recommended adding two aliases on the kubectl and helm subcommands as follows:

echo "alias kubectl='microk8s kubectl'" >> ~/.bash_aliases
echo "alias helm='microk8s helm'" >> ~/.bash_aliases
source ~/.bash_aliases

K9s

We recommend installing K9s, a terminal based client application, as it comes handy while debugging any kubernetes related resource, including watching pod/container logs, deleting pods, scaling replicas and much more: https://k9scli.io/topics/install/

A k9s screenshot