🎉Minikube Installation & Launching your First ☸️ Kubernetes Cluster with Nginx running 🖥️

Awesome! You learned the architecture of one of the top most important tool "Kubernetes"/(K8s) in your previous task.

🎆Introduction

So now it's time to do some hands-on in the Kubernetes and will explore more about the Kubernetes.

Before moving forward we need to install some tool that gives us the capability to work on K8s.

There are several tools we can use to work on K8s like

• Minikube

• Kubeadm

• kind

• K3s

And so on...you can check more here https://github.com/tomhuang12/awesome-k8s-resources#cluster-provisioning

In this article, we will work with Minikube

🖥️ Minikube

Minikube is an open-source tool that allows you to run a single-node Kubernetes cluster locally on your machine.

Minikube is designed to make it easy for developers to set up a Kubernetes environment for local development and testing purposes. It creates a lightweight, isolated Kubernetes cluster that runs inside a virtual machine (VM) on your local system.

This is an excellent way to test in a Kubernetes environment locally, without using up too much resources.

🔣Features of Minikube

• Supports the latest Kubernetes release (+6 previous minor versions)

• Cross-platform (Linux, macOS, Windows)

• Deploy as a VM, a container, or on bare-metal

• Multiple container runtimes (CRI-O, containerd, docker)

• Direct API endpoint for blazing-fast image load and build

• Advanced features such as LoadBalancer, filesystem mounts, FeatureGates, and network policy

• Addons for easily installed Kubernetes applications

• Supports common CI environments

⚙️ Setting Up Minikube on Locally

Follow the below step-by-step instructions to install Docker, Minikube, and Kubelet and make sure the Minikube single-node cluster is setting up locally.

Without any further delay, let’s deep dive into the Minikube Installation steps. Here we will work on the Ubuntu Operating System.

1. 🖥️ Minikube System Requirements

   • 2 GB RAM or more

   • 2 CPU / vCPU or more

   • 20 GB free hard disk space or more

   • Docker Apply updates

1. 🖥️ Apply updates

    $ sudo apt update -y
    $ sudo apt upgrade -y
   

2. 🖥️ Install Minikube Dependencies

   Install the following Minikube dependencies by running the command.

    $ sudo apt install -y curl wget apt-transport-https
   

3. 🖥️ Install Docker

   Install the Docler by running the command.

    sudo apt install docker.io
   

   Adding a user to the docker group.

    sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
   

   Start Docker and enable it to launch on system startup.

     sudo systemctl start docker
     sudo systemctl enable docker
   

4. 🔄 Download Minikube Binary

   Download the Minikube binary using curl and make it executable.

     curl -Lo minikube https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64
     chmod +x minikube
     sudo mv minikube /usr/local/bin/
   

5. 📝 Verify the Minikube version

    minikube version
   

   

6. 🖥️ Install Kubectl

   Kubectl is a command line utility that is used to interact with the Kubernetes cluster. It is used for managing deployments, services and pods, etc. Use the below curl command to download the latest version of kubectl.

     curl -LO "https://dl.k8s.io/release/$(curl -L -s https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable.txt)/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl"
   

   Once kubectl is downloaded then set the executable permissions on kubectl binary and move it to the path /usr/local/bin.

     chmod +x kubectl
     sudo mv kubectl /usr/local/bin/
   

7. 📝 Verify the kubectl version

    $ kubectl version -o yaml
   

   

8. 📖 Start Minikube

   As we are already stated in the beginning that we would be using docker as the base for Minikue, so start the Minikube with the docker driver, run

    $ minikube start --driver=docker
   

9. 📝Check Minikube Status

   Run the below minikube command to check the status,

   $ minikube status
   

   

10. 📝 Verifying the Minikube Cluster

    Run the below kubectl command to check the minikube cluster

    kubectl get nodes
    

    

    Inspect the statuses of pods and namespaces

    kubectl get pods --all-namespaces
    

    This action will display active pods categorized within various namespaces within the Minikube cluster.

    

    Run the following kubectl command to verify cluster-info

    $ kubectl cluster-info
    

    

11. 📝 Managing Minikube Cluster

    To stop the minikube, run

    $ minikube stop
    

    To delete the minikube, run

    $ minikube delete
    

    To Start the minikube, run

    $ minikube start
    

    In case you want to start the minikube with higher resources like 8 GB RM and 4 CPU then execute the following commands one after the other.

    $ minikube config set cpus 4
    $ minikube config set memory 8192
    $ minikube delete
    $ minikube start
    

📝Let's understand the concept of "pod"

Pods are the smallest deployable units of computing that you can create and manage in Kubernetes.

A Pod (as in a pod of whales or pea pod) is a group of one or more containers, with shared storage and network resources, and a specification for how to run the containers. A Pod's contents are always co-located and co-scheduled, and run in a shared context. A Pod models an application-specific "logical host": it contains one or more application containers whi

📝 Create your first pod on Kubernetes through Minikube

📝 Creating the YAML configuration file for the pod

1. Here we will create our first Nginx pod with the help of nginx.yamlfile where we can configure our pod information.

   To know more about YAML https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/what-is-the-difference-between-yaml-and-json/?ref=gcse

    apiVersion: v1
    kind: Pod
    metadata:
      name: nginxpod
      labels:
        app: nginx
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: nginxcontainer
        image: nginx:latest
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80
   

2. 📝 Explanation of the above YAML file:

   1. apiVersion and kind: These fields specify the API version and the kind of Kubernetes resource you're defining. In this case, it's pod, which is the smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes.

      metadata: This section contains metadata about the pod, including its name and labels. Labels are key-value pairs that can be used for identifying and grouping pods.

      • name: The name of the pod is set to "nginx-pod."

      • labels: A label with the key "app" and the value "nginx" is assigned to this pod. Labels are used for selecting and organizing pods.

      • spec: This is the specification for the pod, which defines its desired state.

        • containers: This section specifies the containers to run within the pod. In this case, there is one container.

        • name: The name of the container is set to "nginxcontainer."

        • image: The Docker image to use for this container is "nginx:latest." This means it will pull the latest version of the official Nginx Docker image from Docker Hub.

      • ports: This will specify that the Nginx will run on port 80.

1. 📝 Creating the Pod

   To create the Nginx application pod run the below command to create the Kubernetes pod

    kubectl apply -f <pod-yaml-filename>
   

   Once you run the above command the pod will be created and you can see the pod by running the below command.

    kubctl get pods 
   
    #Run this command for more information about pod
    kubctl get pods -o wide
   

   

   Here you can see the IP is assigned to the pod that is 10.224.0.12 .

2. 🔄 Running the Nginx application

   As we know pod is the smallest object of the Kubernetes and the container is present in the pod only.

   Here in the Kubernetes container inside the pod does not have any IP address. Here the pod has the IP address.

   As of now, we are not exposing the application to the external world, So to run the application we have to log in to the cluster using the below command.

   We will learn more about networking in upcoming blogs how to expose the application to external worlds and so on...

    minikube ssh
   

   

🎉Conclusion

That’s all from this tutorial, I hope you have learned how to install Minikube and how to create the pod and deploy the pod, accessing your containerized application.

Stay tuned for more about Kubernetes...

Please don’t hesitate to share your feedback and comments.

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