Setting up a Google Kubernetes Engine Cluster

To deploy LTD Keeper we recommend using Docker Containers orchestrated by Kubernetes. Although Kubernetes can be hosted on any public or private cloud, Google Kubernetes Engine provides a convenient platform to run Kubernetes. This page will describe how to install the Google command line apps, configure them, and create a cluster.

Setup the Cloud Platform Project

First, you need to create a project on Google Cloud Platform. Follow Google’s Getting Started instructions to:

  1. Create a Project on Google Cloud Platform. Note that you can have multiple clusters in a Project; projects are mostly to ease administration, access, and billing.

  2. Enable the Container Engine API.

  3. Install gcloud (CLI for Google Cloud Platform) and kubectl (CLI for Kubernetes). See Google’s Install the Google Cloud SDK.

  4. Set your gcloud defaults to use the project’s ID and set a default zone. For example:

    gcloud config set project plasma-geode-127520
gcloud config set compute/zone us-central1-b

Create the cluster

Now that gcloud is configured to use the correct Project, in the right zone, we can create a cluster of Google Compute Engine nodes.

Note that Kubernetes clusters need to be homogeneous; you cannot match different machine types.1 Google has a page listing the specs and pricing of instance types.. Once a cluster is created you can easily expand it by adding nodes (or decrease the number of nodes).

1

https://medium.com/@betz.mark/comparing-amazon-elastic-container-service-and-google-kubernetes-1c63fbf19ccd#.sc5mywy0s

For development, a single node cluster with the g1-small machine type is sufficient. For example:

gcloud container clusters create lsst-docs \
    --num-nodes 2 \
    --machine-type g1-small

Then make this lsst-docs cluster the default and obtain the credentials:

gcloud config set container/cluster lsst-docs
gcloud container clusters get-credentials lsst-docs

You can later rescale this cluster. For example:

gcloud container clusters resize lsst-the-docs --size=2

Often it’s necessary to rescale the cluster when pods can’t be scheduled because the existing nodes are fully utilized.

Checklist for other users to access the cluster

If you just need to work with a pre-existing project and cluster, configure gcloud and kubectl as follows:

  1. Install gcloud and kubectl

  2. Set the gcloud defaults and get credentials for the cluster:

    gcloud config set project plasma-geode-127520
gcloud config set compute/zone us-central1-b
gcloud config set container/cluster lsst-docs
gcloud container clusters get-credentials lsst-docs

You can review your gcloud default configurations with:

gcloud config list

Next, configure a Cloud SQL instance.