This past week and half, I have been spending quite a bit of time familiarizing myself with the recently released VMware Pivotal Container Service solution, also referred to as VMware PKS for short (yes, that is a K not a C which is a nod to Google's container scheduler Kubernetes). VMware PKS is part of a project that I am currently working on and I figure I would share the process and steps I took to deploy VMware PKS in my own personal lab, in case other folks are interested in trying out this neat and powerful solution for deploying Cloud Native Apps using Kubernetes which was co-developed between VMware, Pivotal and Google.
If you would like to learn more about this first release of VMware PKS and the benefits it provides to both developers (consumers) and operators (admins/SRE) for Kubernetes infrastructure, check out this blog post here. Merlin Glynn, one of the Product Managers for PKS also did an awesome light board video overview of VMware PKS if you want the sparks notes version. If you simply want to give PKS a try without deploying anything, the CNA folks have also published a PKS HOL which can you find here. Another useful resource is the Getting Started with Kubernetes-as-a-Service post from Michael West who works in CNA team and built the PKS HOL.
This will be the first, in a series of articles outlining my VMware PKS deployment and configuration which hopefully can help benefit others as it took me several attempts while learning about the solution. Although the first few articles will include manual guidance, rest assure, there will be some cool automation towards the end but I figure that folks may want to go through this once by hand to get a good understanding on all the different components and how they interact with each other. Plus, some of the PKS-specific automation is still being worked on by the product team and hopefully I will be able to share some of that real soon.
If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:
- Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 1: Overview
- Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 2: PKS Client
- Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 3: NSX-T
- Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 4: Ops Manager & BOSH
- Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 5: PKS Control Plane
- Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 6: Kubernetes Go!
- Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 7: Harbor
- Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 8: Monitoring Tool Overview
- Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 9: Logging
- Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 10: Infrastructure Monitoring
- Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 11: Application Monitoring
- vGhetto Automated Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Lab Deployment