Kubernetes Cluster Federation (The Hard Way)

This tutorial will walk you through setting up a Kubernetes cluster federation composed of four Kubernetes clusters across multiple GCP regions.

This guide is not for people looking for a fully automated command to bring up a Kubernetes cluster federation. If that's you then check out Setting up Cluster Federation with Kubefed.

This tutorial is optimized for learning, which means taking the long route to help people understand each task required to bootstrap a Kubernetes cluster federation. This tutorial requires access to Google Compute Engine.

Prerequisites

Clone This Repository

Checkout this repository which contains the Kubernetes configs required to provision a federated control plane.

git clone https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-cluster-federation.git

cd kubernetes-cluster-federation

Bootstrapping Tasks

This tutorial will leverage Google Container Engine to provision four Kubernetes clusters across multiple GCP regions.

• Provision Kubernetes Clusters
• Create GCE DNS Managed Zone
• Download an Updated Kubernetes Client

Provision Federated Control Plane

The federated control plane must run in a Kubernetes host cluster which has access to a set of cluster configurations and secrets for accessing them. The following labs will walk you through provisioning a federated control plane in the us-central1-b cluster.

• Provision the Federated API Server
• Provision the Federated Controller Manager
• Adding Clusters to the Federation

Running Federated Workloads

• Federated NGINX Service
• Federated Secrets

Cleaning Up

• Delete Federated Cluster