7-self-hosted.md

Creating a Self-Hosted Cluster

A self-hosted cluster is a cluster that acts as both the management cluster and the workload cluster. A self-hosted cluster manages its own lifecycle.

In this section we will create a workload cluster and make it self-hosted by converting it into its own management cluster.

Table of Contents

• Create a Cluster
• Convert Workload Cluster to Management Cluster
• Clean up
• Next: Deleting clusters and cleaning up
• More information

Create a Cluster

First, lets create a workload cluster called docker-cluster-self-hosted. These steps will be similar to how we created docker-cluster-one.

Create the cluster:

kubectl apply -f yamls/clusters/7-docker-cluster-self-hosted.yaml

Retrieve the cluster's kubeconfig: (you might have to retry the command after the cluster is provisioned)

kind get kubeconfig --name docker-cluster-self-hosted > self-hosted.kubeconfig

Install Calico on the Cluster using our prepared yaml spec:

kubectl --kubeconfig self-hosted.kubeconfig apply -f yamls/cni/calico.yaml

Let's wait until all nodes are ready:

kubectl --kubeconfig self-hosted.kubeconfig get nodes -w

Convert Workload Cluster to Management Cluster

Now that we have the docker-cluster-self-hosted workload cluster lets install Cluster API components on it to make it a management cluster.

For Windows users:

$env:CLUSTERCTL_REPOSITORY_PATH = ([System.Uri](Get-Item .).FullName).AbsoluteUri + "/clusterctl/repository"
$env:CLUSTER_TOPOLOGY = 'true'
$env:EXP_RUNTIME_SDK = 'true'
clusterctl init --kubeconfig self-hosted.kubeconfig --infrastructure docker --config ./clusterctl/repository/config.yaml

For macOS and Linux users:

export CLUSTERCTL_REPOSITORY_PATH=$(pwd)/clusterctl/repository
export CLUSTER_TOPOLOGY=true
export EXP_RUNTIME_SDK=true
clusterctl init --kubeconfig self-hosted.kubeconfig --infrastructure docker --config ./clusterctl/repository/config.yaml

Make sure that the Cluster API components are installed successfully by running:

kubectl --kubeconfig self-hosted.kubeconfig get deployments -A

The output should look like:

NAMESPACE                           NAME                                            READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
capd-system                         capd-controller-manager                         1/1     1            1           22m
capi-kubeadm-bootstrap-system       capi-kubeadm-bootstrap-controller-manager       1/1     1            1           22m
capi-kubeadm-control-plane-system   capi-kubeadm-control-plane-controller-manager   1/1     1            1           22m
capi-system                         capi-controller-manager                         1/1     1            1           22m
cert-manager                        cert-manager                                    1/1     1            1           23m
cert-manager                        cert-manager-cainjector                         1/1     1            1           23m
cert-manager                        cert-manager-webhook                            1/1     1            1           23m
kube-system                         calico-kube-controllers                         1/1     1            1           23m
kube-system                         coredns                                         2/2     2            2           24m

Now lets move the Cluster API resources to the self-hosted cluster

clusterctl move --to-kubeconfig self-hosted.kubeconfig

The output should look like:

Performing move...
Discovering Cluster API objects
Moving Cluster API objects Clusters=2
Moving Cluster API objects ClusterClasses=1
Creating objects in the target cluster
Deleting objects from the source cluster

We have successfully made docker-cluster-self-hosted a self-hosted cluster. Lets take a look at how the self-hosted cluster looks.

kubectl --kubeconfig self-hosted.kubeconfig get clusters

The output resembles:

NAME                         PHASE         AGE   VERSION
docker-cluster-self-hosted   Provisioned   3m    v1.24.6

Notice that the docker-cluster-self-hosted is listed among the clusters that it is managing. We got a self-hosted cluster!

Try scaling the MachineDeployments on the self-hosted cluster to observe how simple it is to manage a self-hosted cluster.

Do you remember how to scale the MachineDeployments? (Hint: look at scale operation).

Clean up

Before moving to the next sections of the tutorial lets convert kubecon-na-22-capi-lab back into our management cluster.

kind get kubeconfig --name kubecon-na-22-capi-lab > kubecon-na-22-capi-lab.kubeconfig

clusterctl move --kubeconfig self-hosted.kubeconfig --to-kubeconfig kubecon-na-22-capi-lab.kubeconfig

After successfully moving back lets delete the docker-cluster-self-hosted cluster:

kubectl delete cluster docker-cluster-self-hosted

Next: Deleting clusters and cleaning up

Next - find out how to clean up this tutorial

More information

• To learn more about self-hosting a management cluster see the clusterctl pivot section in the CAPI book.