Skip to main content

Steward on Kind

This guide will lead you through the process of creating a working Steward setup using Kind cluster. The guide requires the following installed on your workstation: docker, kind, helm, and kubectl.

!!! warning "Development Only" Run Steward on kind only for development or learning purposes.

Steward is designed to be run on production-grade Kubernetes clusters, such as those provided by cloud providers or on-premises solutions. Kind is not a production-grade Kubernetes cluster, and it is not recommended to run in production environments.

Summary​

Creating Kind Cluster​

Create a kind cluster.

kind create cluster --name steward

This will take a short while for the kind cluster to be created.

Installing Cert-Manager​

Steward has a dependency on Cert Manager, as it uses dynamic admission control, validating and mutating webhook configurations which are secured by a TLS communication, these certificates are managed by cert-manager. Hence, it needs to be added.

Add the Bitnami Repo to the Helm Manager.

helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami

Install Cert Manager using Helm

helm upgrade --install cert-manager bitnami/cert-manager \
  --namespace certmanager-system \
  --create-namespace \
  --set "installCRDs=true"

This will install cert-manager to the cluster. You can watch the progress of the installation on the cluster using the command

kubectl get pods -Aw

Installing MetalLb​

MetalLB is used in order to dynamically assign IP addresses to the components, and also define custom IP Address Pools. Install MetalLb using the kubectl command for apply the manifest:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/metallb/metallb/v0.13.7/config/manifests/metallb-native.yaml

This will install MetalLb onto the cluster with all the necessary resources.

Creating IP Address Pool​

Extract the Gateway IP of the network Kind is running on.

GW_IP=$(docker network inspect -f '{{range .IPAM.Config}}{{.Gateway}}{{end}}' kind)

Modify the IP Address, and create the resource to be added to the cluster to create the IP Address Pool

NET_IP=$(echo ${GW_IP} | sed -E 's|^([0-9]+\.[0-9]+)\..*$|\1|g')
cat << EOF | sed -E "s|172.19|${NET_IP}|g" | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: metallb.io/v1beta1
kind: IPAddressPool
metadata:
  name: kind-ip-pool
  namespace: metallb-system
spec:
  addresses:
  - 172.19.255.200-172.19.255.250
---
apiVersion: metallb.io/v1beta1
kind: L2Advertisement
metadata:
  name: emtpy
  namespace: metallb-system
EOF

Installing Steward​

  • Add the Butler Labs Repo to the Helm Manager.
helm repo add butlerlabs https://butlerlabs.github.io/charts
  • Install Steward with Helm
helm upgrade --install steward butlerlabs/steward \
  --namespace steward-system \
  --create-namespace \
  --set 'resources=null' \
  --version 0.0.0+latest
  • Watch the progress of the deployments
kubectl get pods -Aw
  • Verify by first checking Steward CRDs
kubectl get crds | grep -i steward

!!! Info "CSI Drivers" Steward requires a storage provider installed on the management cluster. Kind by default provides local-path-provisioner, but one can have any other CSI Drivers.

Creating Tenant Control Plane​

  • Create a Tenant Control Plane using the command
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/butlerlabs/steward/master/config/samples/steward_v1alpha1_tenantcontrolplane.yaml
  • Watch the progress of the Tenant Control Plane by
kubectl get tcp -w
  • You can attempt to get the details of the control plane by downloading the kubeconfig file
# Set the SECRET as KUBECONFIG column listed in the tcp output.
SECRET=""
kubectl get secret $SECRET -o jsonpath='{.data.admin\.conf}'|base64 -d > /tmp/steward.conf
  • (options) if you run kind in some specific systems with docker bridge network, eg macOS, you may need to access the kind container, and perform the kubectl actions:
docker exec -it $(docker container list | grep steward-control-plane | awk '{print $1}') bash
  • Export the kubeconfig file to the environment variable KUBECONFIG
export KUBECONFIG=/tmp/steward.conf
  • Notice that the kubectl version changes, and there are no nodes now.
kubectl version
kubectl get nodes

A Video Tutorial of the demonstration can also be viewed.