Deploying Alpine to GKE micro

In this post I will document the link and steps that I use to create a micro cluster in GKE and deploy the Alpine container. I will not repeat steps that are well documented, instead I will provide links to those steps (why duplicate the wheel, right?)

• The Alpine container is a very simple Linux distro build on top of busybox. For more info refer to the docker hub docs

• A Micro cluster, is a very small cluster for testing purposes

Plan your cluster

ß The options are:

• Public endpoint access disabled
• Public endpoint access enabled, master authorized networks enabled
• Public endpoint access enabled, master authorized networks disabled

What type of cluster do you want you is the starting point, for that you can use this document: https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/private-cluster-concept, they also have a nice table for you to consider the right option for your cluster.

Create the micro cluster

I decided to create a Private Cluster, that is one that Public endpoint access enabled, and master authorized networks enabled. This topic is well describe in the google docs here: https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/private-clusters#all_access

Getting the charts for alpine

To deploy alpine in the cluster, I configured my Laptop gcloud tools.

gcloud container clusters get-credentials av-test --zone=us-east1-c

helm repo add stable https://kubernetes-charts.storage.googleapis.com/

To get the alpine charts from the helm repo testdata located here: https://github.com/helm/helm/tree/master/cmd/helm/testdata/testcharts/alpine, you can opt to do a sparseCheckout, but for me it didn’t work it simply downloaded everything as opposed of just the cmd/helm/testdata/testcharts/alpine/, the steps should work as per this post but that is a problem for another time. I leave the steps here to see if they work for you.

mkdir helm
cd helm
git init
git remote add -f origin https://github.com/helm/helm.git
git config core.sparseCheckout true
echo "cmd/helm/testdata/testcharts/alpine/" >.git/info/spare-checkout
git pull origin master

Installing Alpine on the clusters

Move into the cmd/helm/testdata/testcharts/ directory. At this time of this write up using: version.BuildInfo{Version:"v3.1.2", GitCommit:"d878d4d45863e42fd5cff6743294a11d28a9abce", GitTreeState:"clean", GoVersion:"go1.13.8"} I run into a problem that caused me to modify the charts and remove/comment line 15, on template/alpine-pod.yaml.

#app.kubernetes.io/version: {{ .Chart.AppVersion }}

After removing that line you can do:

1. helm install alpine-demo ./alpine

Check that alpine is working

Using the following cmd, you should see one pod called my-alpine

• kubectl get pods

Using the following cmd, you should be able to get into the pod

• kubectl exec -it my-alpine sh

Connecting to a VM outside of the cluster, but still in GCP

I have the requirement to connect the pods running in the cluster to a Compute Engine (VM) running with an internal IP and not exposed to the internet. I have not completed this work at this time but will create a post when I do.