How can you set up Kuber­netes? Beginner-friendly Kuber­netes tutorial

Kuber­netes (also known as K8s) enables efficient man­age­ment of large numbers of con­tain­ers and automates many processes in software de­vel­op­ment. With just a few steps, you can install a powerful Kuber­netes cluster and start using it pro­duct­ively right away.

Step 1: Prepare the system

In this tutorial, we’ll demon­strate in­stalling Kuber­netes on Ubuntu.

First, prepare the system by updating it to the latest version and in­stalling all necessary de­pend­en­cies. Open the terminal and run a system update to ensure all packages are current:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Next, install the key utilities required for in­stalling Kuber­netes and Minikube. You can use the following command:

sudo apt install -y curl wget apt-transport-https ca-certificates gnupg lsb-release

These tools ensure you can securely use external sources and easily download and install ad­di­tion­al software packages.

Step 2: Install kubectl

Kuber­netes works with different servers: the master and various nodes. These do not ne­ces­sar­ily have to be on different physical servers. Virtual machines make it possible to run multiple Kuber­netes nodes on a single computer. For testing purposes, the free program Minikube has proven es­pe­cially useful. It lets you work with Kuber­netes locally. Since Minikube requires either a virtual machine or Docker, it depends on a hy­per­visor or container software. You’ll also need the tool kubectl.

First, install kubectl (Kube Control) on your system. This program is required to manage clusters.

curl -LO "https://dl.k8s.io/release/$(curl -Ls https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable.txt)/bin/linux/arm64/kubectl"
chmod +x kubectl
sudo mv kubectl /usr/local/bin/

Step 3: Install Docker

Before using Minikube, make sure Docker is installed on your system. Docker acts as the container runtime and allows Minikube to run Kuber­netes clusters without vir­tu­al­isa­tion software. Install Docker with the following command:

sudo apt install -y docker.io

To use Docker without root priv­ileges, add your user account to the Docker group:

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker

You may need to log out and back in for the group change to take effect. Test the in­stall­a­tion with:

docker run hello-world

If you see a short success message, Docker is installed and ready for Minikube.

Step 4: Install and start Minikube

Next, install Minikube in a com­pat­ible version and use Docker as the driver. First, download the ap­pro­pri­ate version of Minikube, make the file ex­ecut­able, and move it to a system directory so the command is globally available:

curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-arm64
chmod +x minikube-linux-arm64
sudo mv minikube-linux-arm64 /usr/local/bin/minikube

After in­stall­a­tion, check if Minikube is set up correctly:

minikube version

Then, start Minikube with:

minikube start --driver=docker

Minikube uses Docker as the container runtime in this scenario and creates the Kuber­netes cluster directly within the Docker en­vir­on­ment. When Minikube starts, kubectl should be auto­mat­ic­ally con­figured. To switch from the command line to a GUI, enter another command. This will open the dashboard in your default browser.

minikube dashboard

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Step 5: Try Kuber­netes out

When you start Minikube, it auto­mat­ic­ally creates a cluster with a single node. You can check this with kubectl:

kubectl get nodes

Through the dashboard, you can now create de­ploy­ments. Click the Create button (the plus sign in the upper right) to open a web-based editor. In JSON or YAML format, you can create a de­ploy­ment there. Once you’ve done this, Kuber­netes auto­mat­ic­ally generates multiple pods. You can adjust the desired number by scaling the de­ploy­ment. You’ll find this function by clicking the three-dot button next to the de­ploy­ment.

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Al­tern­at­ively, you can create de­ploy­ments via the terminal, as long as the content is already packaged in a Docker image stored in a re­pos­it­ory:

kubectl create deployment --image=[path to the image]

You can retrieve a variety of in­form­a­tion using command-line commands.

Which de­ploy­ments are available?

kubectl get deployments

How many pods are there?

kubectl get pods

Which services are available?

kubectl get services

Which nodes are active?

kubectl get nodes

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Step 6: Publish a de­ploy­ment

So far, you have started your de­ploy­ment but have not yet published it. To publish it, create a service:

kubectl expose deploy test-deployment

This way, the service is published only within the cluster. To access the de­ploy­ment from outside the cluster, add ad­di­tion­al flags:

kubectl expose deploy test-deployment --type=LoadBalancer --port=8080

With Minikube, you can then start the service:

minikube service test-deployment

If you want to delete the service, there’s also a command for that:

kubectl delete service test-deployment

The de­ploy­ment can also be deleted:

kubectl delete deployment test-deployment

To finally shut down Minikube, stop the process:

minikube stop

If you no longer want to work with the VM or the container runtime, you can delete it as well.

minikube delete

Afterward, all con­fig­ur­a­tions, created de­ploy­ments, and pods are removed. When you start Minikube again, you will be working with an empty cluster.