My 1st WinOS K8 clusters

Bringing online a Kubernetes cluster in Windows using Docker Desktop’s builtin Kubernetes solution.
Categories:
Tags:

  2 minute read  

Purpose

This page provides step-by-step instructions on how to bring online a simple test Kubernetes Cluster on Windows. So you can be one of the cool kids.

Prerequisites

  • Windows Administrator privileges
  • Chocolatey installed

General Information

Kubernetes is a platform which allows container based applications to follow cloud native practices via abstraction. The CNCF and community behind Kubernetes have done an excellent job steering the platform’s development the last 5 years with nearly major IT or Cloud vendors.

It maybe an oversimplification but I like to think of Kubernetes as having virtualised the core cloud technologies in the same way that VMWare’s vCentre virtualised Data Centers.

Instructions

Install Docker Desktop

  1. Load up a command prompt or powershell with administrator privileges Press Ctrl & Esc at the same time, search for powershell and then then select ‘Run as administrator’

  2. Install Docker-desktop via chocolatey.

choco install -y docker-desktop

Enable Kubernetes in Docker Desktop

  1. Open the Docker Desktop settings.
  2. Click on the Kubernetes tab.
  3. Click on the Enable Kubernetes button, then Install if prompted and wait since this can take some time.

Internet is required to install k8 from docker desktop the first time

Connecting to Kubernetes Cluster

  1. Install the Kubernetes CLI via Chocolatey, Kubectl.

    1. Open the command prompt or powershell with administrator privileges and run
    choco install -y kubernetes-cli

  2. Check the kubectl is connected to the ‘docker-desktop’ cluster by running kubectl config current-context and that it can actually connect to the cluster by running kubectl version which will give you the version of the Kubernetes cluster.

The current context should be docker-desktop and a server version details should be returned.

Generally the Kubectl and server version shouldn’t be too far apart, but the API doesn’t break often.

If this is the first time you have created a kubectl cluster on Windows it should work, but if you have previously connected to different clusters you may need to update your kubernetes connection file %HOMEPATH%\.kube\config or set context via kubectl config.

Note: If you plan on connecting to multiple Kubernetes clusters it is a good idea to keep your configuration file tidy (by deleting test clusters etc) and generally update it with good context names to allow for easy swapping between clusters. Since this configuration file is used by many tools and can quickly become messy if not maintained.