Cluster API on Docker

A Getting Started Guide

Overview

Cluster API is beautiful Kubernetes project which allows provisioning, upgrading, and operating multiple Kubernetes clusters using declarative APIs.

Kind is another beautiful project to build Kubernetes cluster on docker.

Both of the above projects are blessings for someone like me who wants to build cluster dynamically for development purpose. But the journey was not smooth when I stared using using using cluster-api version 3.8. Lot of hacks need to be made to make it working.

Although cluster api new version (at the time of writing it was v0.3.14) improves it a lot, the quick-start guide provided does not provide clarity on the dependency and thus I thought to write an article to build it on Docker without spending hours to find the issue.

Concepts

Let’s understand the concept before getting stated. We could also just use kind to create multiple Kubernetes clusters, but it will not provide the functionality that cluster-api provides as well as real world scenario where it is not easy to build a Kubernetes Cluster.

Kind allows to create a Kubernetes cluster, which we provision as Management Cluster using the Cluster API by using clusterctl.