How to Deploy Rancher on MicroK8s: A Step-by-Step Guide

MicroK8s is a low-ops, minimal production Kubernetes.

MicroK8s is an open-source system for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It offers the core features of Kubernetes in a compact form, scalable from a single node to a high-availability production cluster.

Get started

what you'll need

• An Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS environment to run the commands.

• MicroK8s runs with as little as 540MB of memory, but to handle workloads, you need a system with at least 20GB of disk space and 4GB of memory.

• An internet connection

1. Install MicroK8s

   MicroK8s will install a minimal, lightweight Kubernetes that you can run on almost any machine. You can install it with a snap:

    sudo snap install microk8s --classic --channel=1.27
   

2. Join the group

   MicroK8s creates a group to allow easy use of commands that need admin privileges. To add your current user to the group and access the .kube caching directory, run these three commands:

    sudo usermod -a -G microk8s $USER
    mkdir -p ~/.kube
    chmod 0700 ~/.kube
   

   re-enter the session

3. Check the status

   MicroK8s has a built-in command to display its status. During installation, you can use the --wait-ready flag to wait for the Kubernetes services to initialize:

    microk8s status --wait-ready
   

4. Access Kubernetes

   MicroK8s includes its own version of kubectl for accessing Kubernetes. Use it to run commands to monitor and control your Kubernetes setup. For example, to view your node, you can use the following command:

    microk8s kubectl get nodes
   

   …or to see the running services:

    microk8s kubectl get services
   

   MicroK8s uses a namespaced kubectl command to avoid conflicts with any existing kubectl installations. If you don't have kubectl installed, you can add an alias to make it easier to use. Just append the following to ~/.bash_aliases:

    alias kubectl='microk8s kubectl'
   

5. MetalLB

   MetalLB is a load-balancer implementation for bare metal Kubernetes clusters, using standard routing protocols. It will monitor for services with the type LoadBalancer and assign them an IP address from a virtual pool.

    microk8s enable metallb
   

6. Ingress

   Ingress exposes HTTP and HTTPS routes from outside the cluster to services within the cluster. Traffic routing is controlled by rules defined on the Ingress resource.

    microk8s enable ingress
   
    # Get ingress-controller External-IP
    microk8s kubectl -n ingress get svc
    NAME      TYPE           CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)                      AGE
    ingress   LoadBalancer   10.152.183.125   10.10.11.60   80:31468/TCP,443:32521/TCP   67s
   

7. What is a Rancher?

   Rancher is a Kubernetes management tool that allows you to deploy and run clusters anywhere and on any provider.

   Rancher can set up Kubernetes from a hosted provider, create compute nodes, install Kubernetes on them, or import existing Kubernetes clusters running anywhere.

   Deploy a Rancher

   Add the Helm Chart Repository

   Use helm repo add command to add the Helm chart repository that contains charts to install Rancher.

    # Stable: Recommended for production environments
    microk8s helm repo add rancher-stable https://releases.rancher.com/server-charts/stable
   

   Enable cert-manager

    microk8s enable cert-manager
   

   Install a Rancher

    microk8s helm install rancher rancher-stable/rancher 
    --create-namespace \
    --namespace cattle-system \
    --version v2.8.1 \
    --set hostname=10.10.11.57.sslip.io \
    --set bootstrapPassword=Rancher@123# \
    --set replicas=1
   

   Verify that the Rancher Server is Successfully Deployed

    kubectl -n cattle-system rollout status deploy/rancher
    deployment "rancher" successfully rolled out
   
    kubectl -n cattle-system get deploy rancher
    NAME      READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
    rancher   3/3     3            3           5m48s
   

   Finishing Up

   That's it. You should have a functional Rancher server.