Overview

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This tutorial can be run on Linux and macOS. HOWEVER, if you are using a Mac, you need to complete a few extra steps. These are on the next page. Linux users can skip ahead.

In this tutorial we will use a single local machine to act as multiple devices in a development Liquid Metal platform.

We have tested this tutorial on Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04, but any current linux distribution with systemctl should do.

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A Liquid Metal system/platform refers to the combination of a CAPI management cluster running CAPMVM, and a number of bare metal devices running Flintlock which are able to host MicroVMs.

A Liquid Metal cluster refers to a workload cluster created by CAPMVM with nodes running in MicroVMs created by flintlockd on the bare metal host.

In this workshop we will configured configure your local computer to act as both bare-metal host and a management CAPI cluster.

Part 1 - microvm host:

We will:

• 🕸️ Configure a custom virtual network to segregate our virtual devices
• 🔌 Install all required MicroVM host components
  • Firecracker
  • Containerd
  • Flintlock
• 🏃‍♂️ Start the flintlockd service

Part 2 - management cluster:

We will:

• 👩‍💼 Use kind to create a local kubernetes cluster which will act as our CAPI management cluster
• 🔧 Install CAPI and CAPMVM on that kind cluster
• 🤘 Write a manifest for a bare metal cluster with one control-plane node and 5 workers
• 📝 Apply the manifest to the kind cluster
• 👀 Watch as CAPMVM connects to our flintlockd service to create MicroVMs
• 🏗️ See kubernetes nodes brought up in each MicroVM, and joined in a workload cluster

Part 3 - wrap up:

We will:

• 🔍 Take a look around the environment
• 🧨 Tear down:
  • The bare metal workload cluster
  • The management kind cluster
  • All running host services
  • The custom virtual network

Let's get into it...

HELP

This tutorial is brand new. If you experience any issues or difficulties, please come to the Slack channel or open an issue in Github.