Kubernetes on NixOS
This document will serve to document the way I setup my own little personal kubernetes cluster on NixOS. I am using virtual machines for this (as of today) because it is simpler to use, and as for microk8s document, I rely on the fact that my network setup is capable of assigning a predefined IP to a given mac address.
Why Kubernetes at home ?
The first question that can come to mind is “why the hell do you want to setup a kubernetes cluster at home” ? And… that’s a valid question.
I work daily on Kubernetes and OpenShift, and on a CI/CD tooling that I want to be as useful as possible. If I don’t use it myself, what the hell am I doing right ? That’s the main reason why setuping a Kubernetes (and of course Tekton on it) — gaining operational knowledge, find the gap and enhancements, …
Bootstrap the cluster
How big should the cluster be ? 3 nodes or 5 nodes ? Let’s start with 3, and figure the rest out.
We need to do the following to boostrap the cluster:
- Configure the network to allocate a set of IP for a set a MAC address
- Create VMs images (
qcow2) with NixOS and the base system on - Create VMs on a remote server libvirt
- Hopefully enjoy, and
sshonto them in need be
Ideally, the image we build is using the configuration, this means we should, in theory,
use nixos-generate targeting our node configuration, and it should be the exact same thing
used for morph.
Once the images are created, we need to copy them to the right host and from there, create the virtual machine. Ideally, we do this automatically, command-line, …