There are lots of ways to run Kubernetes on your Windows development machine, for example minikube. Even Docker Desktop for Windows now ships with the ability to run a single node Kubernetes cluster, but the simplest and most flexible way I’ve found to run a multi-node Kubernetes cluster locally on Windows is using Kind or Kubernetes in Docker.
Note
All commands should be run from an elevated (administrator) powershell or command prompt
Also, commands listed are for powershell. If using a command prompt you may need to make the appropriate modifications to the paths etc.
Prerequisites
In order to run Kind locally you’ll need to have or install Docker Desktop for Windows (you’re going to be running the nodes of your cluster in docker containers), kubectl (the Kubernetes command line utility), and of course kind. The easiest way to install them is using the Chocolatey package manager. (Strictly speaking you don’t have to have kubectl to set up a kind cluster, but it will make the cluster far more useful once you have it up and running! 🙂 )
choco install docker-desktop choco install kubernetes-cli choco install kind
If you would prefer not to use chocolatey, please see the installation documentation for each component
Creating Your First Cluster
Once everything is installed you’re ready to create your first cluster.
kind create cluster
Note this will download a decent sized docker image to run your node(s) and may take a couple of minutes if you have a slower connection, but you should only have to do it once for each version of Kubernetes that you run as the image will be cached by Docker.
This gives us a single node cluster running the latest version of Kubernetes (at the time of this writing that’s 1.20). It also gives our cluster the default name of kind. You can control the version of Kubernetes by specifying the image to use for your nodes using the –image switch on your create cluster command.
kind create cluster --image=kindest/node:v1.19.7@sha256:a70639454e97a4b733f9d9b67e12c01f6b0297449d5b9cbbef87473458e26dca
You can get a list of the images available for a particular kind release on the Kind GitHub Releases page. For example the current release of Kind (0.10.0) supports the following images:
1.20: kindest/node:v1.20.2@sha256:8f7ea6e7642c0da54f04a7ee10431549c0257315b3a634f6ef2fecaaedb19bab 1.19: kindest/node:v1.19.7@sha256:a70639454e97a4b733f9d9b67e12c01f6b0297449d5b9cbbef87473458e26dca 1.18: kindest/node:v1.18.15@sha256:5c1b980c4d0e0e8e7eb9f36f7df525d079a96169c8a8f20d8bd108c0d0889cc4 1.17: kindest/node:v1.17.17@sha256:7b6369d27eee99c7a85c48ffd60e11412dc3f373658bc59b7f4d530b7056823e 1.16: kindest/node:v1.16.15@sha256:c10a63a5bda231c0a379bf91aebf8ad3c79146daca59db816fb963f731852a99 1.15: kindest/node:v1.15.12@sha256:67181f94f0b3072fb56509107b380e38c55e23bf60e6f052fbd8052d26052fb5 1.14: kindest/node:v1.14.10@sha256:3fbed72bcac108055e46e7b4091eb6858ad628ec51bf693c21f5ec34578f6180
You can also set the name of your cluster using the –name switch
kind create cluster --name my-cluster
Removing your Cluster
Eventually you will want to delete/remove/destroy your cluster and reclaim the resources it is using. You can easily accomplish this using the kind delete command.
kind delete --name my-cluster
Going to Multiple-Nodes
So initially I said that we could set up a multi-node cluster using kind, but so far all of our clusters have been a single node. In order to get a multi-node cluster we’ll need to create a configuration file. Here’s a simple example that creates a 3 node cluster (1 control plane node and 2 worker nodes)
# three node (two workers) cluster config kind: Cluster apiVersion: kind.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4 nodes: - role: control-plane - role: worker - role: worker
We can apply our config file by using the –config switch with our create cluster command as follows
kind create cluster --name my-cluster --config .\my-cluster-config.yaml
And there we have it, a multi-node Kubernetes cluster running on your Windows desktop. Kind makes it pretty quick and simple so you can spin one up, play with it while doing some training or deploy test workloads locally to test your entire system locally. Once your done, or you mess things up, delete the cluster and spin up a new one when you need it.
Resources
- Kind Documentation – https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/
- Kind GitHub Repository – https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kind
- Kind Releases – https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kind/releases
- Kuebctl Documentation – https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/kubectl/overview/
- Chocolatey – https://chocolatey.org/