Setting up Kubernetes in Azure

August 18, 2017

In the following, we’re going to show you how to use kubicorn to ramp up a Kubernetes cluster in Azure, use it and tear it down again.

As a prerequisite, you need to have kubicorn installed. Since we don’t have binary releases yet, we assume you’ve got Go installed and simply do:

Installing

$ go get github.com/kubicorn/kubicorn

The first thing you will do now is to define the cluster resources. For this, you need to select a certain profile. Of course, once you’re more familiar with kubicorn, you can go ahead and extend existing profiles or create new ones. In the following we’ll be using an existing profile called azure, which is a profile for a cluster in Azure.

Creating

Now execute the following command:

$ kubicorn create myfirstk8s --profile azure

Verify that kubicorn create did a good job by executing:

$ cat _state/myfirstk8s/cluster.yaml

Feel free to tweak the configuration to your liking here.

Authenticating

Some work will be needed to configure your system to authenticate with kubicorn. Please spend some time and go through each step carefully to ensure your configuration works correctly.

Manually using the Azure CLI tool

Install the Azure CLI tool and login using the following commands.

$ curl -L https://aka.ms/InstallAzureCli | bash
$ exec -l $SHELL
$ az login

Create a Service Principal for the Azure Active Directory using the following command.

$ az ad sp create-for-rbac
{
  "appId": "1234567-1234-1234-1234-1234567890ab",
  "displayName": "azure-cli-2017-08-18-19-25-59",
  "name": "http://azure-cli-2017-08-18-19-25-59",
  "password": "1234567-1234-1234-be18-1234567890ab",
  "tenant": "1234567-1234-1234-be18-1234567890ab"
}

Translate the output from the previous command to newly exported environmental variables.

Warning: The names of the values might change from the previous command to the environmental variables. Follow the chart closely.

Run the following command to get you Azure subscription ID.

$ az account show --query id
"1234567-1234-1234-1234567890ab"

Finally export that value as an environmental variable as well.

At this point you should have the following 4 environmental variables set!

export AZURE_CLIENT_ID = "1234567-1234-1234-1234567890ab"
export AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET = "1234567-1234-1234-1234567890ab"
export AZURE_TENANT_ID = "1234567-1234-1234-1234567890ab"
export AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID = "1234567-1234-1234-1234567890ab"

Also, make sure that the public SSH key for your Azure account is called id_rsa.pub, which is the default in above profile:

$ ls -al ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
-rw-------@ 1 knova  wheel   754B 20 Mar 04:03 /home/knova/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Applying

With the access set up, we can now apply the resources we defined in the first step. This actually creates resources in Azure! Up to now we’ve only been working locally.

So, execute:

$ kubicorn apply myfirstk8s

Now kubicorn will reconcile your intended state against the actual state in the cloud, thus creating a Kubernetes cluster. A kubectl configuration file (kubeconfig) will be created or appended for the cluster on your local filesystem. You can now kubectl get nodes and verify that Kubernetes 1.7.0 is now running. You can also ssh into your instances using the example command found in the output from kubicorn

Deleting

To delete your cluster run:

$ kubicorn delete myfirstk8s

Congratulations, you’re an official kubicorn user now and might want to dive deeper, for example, learning how to define your own profiles.