Automation saves time and effort. And naturally, automation solutions like Kubernetes is something that Linode customers rave about.

Kubernetes simply helps in managing several containers easily. The method to deploy Kubernetes in Linode depends on the type of servers, level of expertise, etc.

At Bobcares, we often get requests from Linode customers to setup Kubernetes in servers as part of our Managed cloud Services.

Today, we’ll see the different methods to setup Kubernetes in Linode and how our customers take benefit out of it.

Why Kubernetes?

Gone are the days where an app runs out of a single server. Now, there is a group of Linode servers that handle the databases, another group that handle web requests and so on. So, for the functioning of a single app, we require a group of servers. Naturally, there is a need for managing these container groups. That’s where Kubernetes help.

Kubernetes automates deployment, scaling, and management of  your apps in Linode servers. It works with container tools like Docker, which makes it even more popular.

Kubernetes works in a master slave model. And, it creates a group of containers for each application called pods. The containers in each pod share storage and network resources.

From our experience in managing Kubernetes Linode setup, the top benefits that our Dedicated Engineers see are:

1. Simple network model: Different pods can talk each other, all containers in the same pod can share a common IP.
2. Kubernetes sets up a DNS server for the cluster and it helps in domain name IP mapping.
3. It supports labeling, that helps in searching and updating multiple containers at a time.
4. Kubernetes makes it easy to scale deployments too.

Top ways to setup Kubernetes

Till now, we saw the various benefits of having Kubernetes in Linode.

There is no dedicated Kubernetes offering from the Linode Manager yet. However, there are many ways to setup Kubernetes.  We’ll now see the top methods that our Dedicated Engineers use for the setup.

1.Installing from repository

To install Kubernetes from scratch, our Dedicated Engineers use the repository method. Here, first we add packages.cloud.google.com to the repository list on Linode server.

The exact instructions depends on the type of Linode server that you have. For example, in a CentOS servers, we edit the file /etc/yum.repos.d/kubernetes.repo and then install the packages using :

yum install -y kubelet kubeadm kubectl

To make use of Kubernetes in setting up the cluster, we configure the master node and then add worker nodes to it.

2. Kube-Linode

Another method to setup Kubernetes in Linode is to use readily available scripts. For instance, Kube-linode is a shell script that automatically provisions the instances and installs Kubernetes for you. To get this up and running, our Support Engineers git clone the repository on the Linode server.

However, to make Kubernetes working, you should also have a Linode API Key with a valid domain that uses Linode’s DNS servers.

3. Using linode-cli

Similarly, Kubernetes can be easily setup using linode-cli too.

Recently a Linode customer having CentOS7 server approached us for Kubernetes setup. Here, our Dedicated Engineers had to install the pip package from the EPEL repository first. We did it using:

yum install epel-release

yum install python-pip

Then, we installed linode-cli using

pip install linode-cli

Further, cluster was created using the command :

linode-cli k8s-alpha create mycluster

[Need help with automation in Linode server? Our Linode Experts can help you.]

Conclusion

Automation using Kubernetes really helps in managing web apps in Linode servers. Today, we saw the top 3 ways that our Cloud Engineers use to setup Kubernetes in Linode server.