Provision a CAPI management cluster

In this workshop we are going to use kind to create a cluster to run CAPI (Cluster API) controllers and the Liquid Metal CAPMVM (Cluster API Provider MicroVM) controllers.

We can then apply yaml manifests to the management cluster, which the CAPI and CAPMVM controllers will act on to create child workload clusters in Microvms.

Kind

First install kind.

Next, use kind to create a cluster:

kind create cluster --name lm-management

Output

Creating cluster "lm-management" ...
 ✓ Ensuring node image (kindest/node:v1.21.1) 🖼
 ✓ Preparing nodes 📦
 ✓ Writing configuration 📜
 ✓ Starting control-plane 🕹️
 ✓ Installing CNI 🔌
 ✓ Installing StorageClass 💾
Set kubectl context to "kind-lm-management"
You can now use your cluster with:

kubectl cluster-info --context kind-lm-management

Have a nice day! 👋

Clusterctl

Install the CAPI CLI tool, clusterctl.

We will use this tool to install both the CAPI and CAPMVM controllers on the management cluster.

CAPMVM

We install CAPMVM by configuring clusterctl to use our custom provider.

Create a cluster-api directory under home:

mkdir -p ~/.cluster-api

Set the CAPMVM version you wish to use in your environment. First check for the version which is compatible with the version of flintlockd you are running. In my case I am using Flintlock v0.3.0, so the compatible CAPMVM version is v0.7.0. If you ran the provisioning step without configuring the flintlock version, then the latest will have been installed.

export CAPMVM_VERSION=v0.7.0

Write the installation information to a clusterctl config file in the cluster-api repo:

cat << EOF >>~/.cluster-api/clusterctl.yaml
providers:
  - name: "microvm"
    url: "https://github.com/liquidmetal-dev/cluster-api-provider-microvm/releases/$CAPMVM_VERSION/infrastructure-components.yaml"
    type: "InfrastructureProvider"
EOF

CAPI

Use clusterctl to initialise the management cluster. This command will install all required controllers.

export EXP_CLUSTER_RESOURCE_SET=true # required for the MicroVM clusters we want to create later

clusterctl init --infrastructure microvm

Output

Fetching providers
Installing cert-manager Version="v1.5.3"
Waiting for cert-manager to be available...
Installing Provider="cluster-api" Version="v1.2.2" TargetNamespace="capi-system"
Installing Provider="bootstrap-kubeadm" Version="v1.2.2" TargetNamespace="capi-kubeadm-bootstrap-system"
I0927 13:51:15.765771  815920 request.go:665] Waited for 1.023726916s due to client-side throttling, not priority and fairness, request: GET:https://127.0.0.1:38035/apis/bootstrap.cluster.x-k8s.io/v1beta1?timeout=30s
Installing Provider="control-plane-kubeadm" Version="v1.2.2" TargetNamespace="capi-kubeadm-control-plane-system"
Installing Provider="infrastructure-microvm" Version="v0.7.0" TargetNamespace="capmvm-system"

Your management cluster has been initialized successfully!

You can now create your first workload cluster by running the following:

  clusterctl generate cluster [name] --kubernetes-version [version] | kubectl apply -f -

tip

If you see an error containing the words "401 Bad Credentials", make sure you don't have any Github auth methods set in your environment. GITHUB_TOKEN is a common culprit and can be removed with unset GITHUB_TOKEN.

We are now ready to create a workload cluster with MicroVMs!