Khader Syed

Kubernetes Setup Using Azure ACS Engine - Part I

These days I spend nearly all of my time on Azure. Ansible support for Azure hasn’t been great until version 2.4, so I’ve even had to build custom modules to do some stuff internally for ourselves.

Beyond that, there’s a lot of interesting and innovative stuff happening in Azure.

In this post, I want to focus on one very specific thing - setting up Kubernetes[1] on Azure. Microsoft already has some great documentation on setting up Kubernetes on Azure and there’s other documentation on the Kubernetes site itself.

I’ve done some work on getting a Kubernetes cluster up in Azure using acs-engine and this post is intended to document that.

Let’s start. I am using Debian 9 as my operating system[2].

  1. First things first - install the dependencies

$ sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl
gnupg2
software-properties-common

#_ Add the docker repository public key, so we can…

$ curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/$(. /etc/os-release; echo "$ID")/gpg | sudo apt-key add -

#_ Add the docker repository to the sources list

$ sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/$(. /etc/os-release; echo "$ID")
$(lsb_release -cs)
stable"

#_ Install Docker Community Edition

$ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install docker-ce

That should be all the required software we need to start using acs-engine.

#_ Next, checkout the acs-engine repo

$ git clone https://github.com/Azure/acs-engine.git

#_ And “bootstrap” the environment, so to speak. For the next step(s), you’ll need to run as a user who can pull docker images, which could be either root or a docker user

$ cd acs-engine $ ./scripts/devenv.sh

The last step above should take a while, as it pulls docker images and all the other dependencies required for acs-engine.

It should then drop you inside a docker container shell.

#_ Once you’re in the container shell, we bootstrap and build

# make bootstrap # make build

#_ Once complete, there should be an acs-engine binary in the bin folder.

# ./bin/acs-engine ACS-Engine deploys and manages Kubernetes, Swarm Mode, and DC/OS clusters in Azure

Usage: acs-engine [command]

Available Commands: deploy deploy an Azure Resource Manager template generate Generate an Azure Resource Manager template help Help about any command orchestrators provide info about supported orchestrators upgrade upgrades an existing Kubernetes cluster version Print the version of ACS-Engine

Flags: --debug enable verbose debug logs -h, --help help for acs-engine

Use "acs-engine [command] --help" for more information about a command.

That’s what we will use to generate templates and build our clusters using azure cli tools.

In Part II, I’ll cover the following:

[1] Take a look at DigitalOcean’s intro to kubernetes.

[2] The steps for other Linux distributions and operations systems are available here. For other operating systems, after you install docker, you can continue from Step 5 above.