Set Up Minikube, Monitoring with prometheus and grafana, SetUp Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA)

5 min readJun 7, 2024

What you’ll need

2 CPUs or more
2GB of free memory
20GB of free disk space
Internet connection
Container or virtual machine manager, such as: Docker, QEMU, Hyperkit, Hyper-V, KVM, Parallels, Podman, VirtualBox, or VMware Fusion/Workstation

Installation

curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube_latest_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i minikube_latest_amd64.deb

#Start your cluster
minikube start

#If you already have kubectl installed
kubectl get po -A

#Create a sample deployment and expose it on port 3000:
kubectl create deployment hello-minikube --laly9999/coming-soon-website:2
kubectl expose deployment hello-minikube --type=NodePort --port=3000

# use kubectl to forward the port:
kubectl port-forward service/hello-minikube 3005:3000

>>>>Tada! Your application is now available at http://localhost:3002

Manage your cluster

#Pause Kubernetes without impacting deployed applications:
minikube pause

#Unpause a paused instance:
minikube unpause

#Halt the cluster:
minikube stop

#Change the default memory limit (requires a restart):
minikube config set memory 9001

#Browse the catalog of easily installed Kubernetes services:
minikube addons list

#Create a second cluster running an older Kubernetes release:
minikube start -p aged --kubernetes-version=v1.16.1

#Delete all of the minikube clusters:
minikube delete --all

Monitoring with prometheus and grafana

Configure Prometheus:

kubectl create ns prometheus
helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update
helm install my-prometheus prometheus-community/prometheus --version 25.8.2 -n prometheus
watch kubectl get pods -n prometheus
kubectl --namespace=prometheus port-forward deploy/my-prometheus-server 9090

Configure Grafana:

kubectl create ns grafana
helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
helm install my-grafana grafana/grafana --version 7.0.19 -n grafana
export POD_NAME=$(kubectl get pods --namespace grafana -l "app.kubernetes.io/name=grafana,app.kubernetes.io/instance=my-grafana" -o jsonpath="{.items[0].metadata.name}")
kubectl get secret --namespace grafana my-grafana -o jsonpath="{.data.admin-password}" | base64 --decode ; echo
kubectl port-forward --namespace grafana $POD_NAME 3000:3000

Go to the browser -> localhost:3000/login ; username=admin -> data sources -> prometheus -> URL=http://localhost:9090

If not working:

kubectl get pods -n prometheus
kubectl describe pod my-prometheus-server-######## -n prometheus   #to get IP

Go to the browser -> localhost:3000/login ; username=admin -> data sources -> prometheus -> URL=http://IP:9090

Grafana -> new dashboard -> import dashboard -> import via grafana =3119

To get different dashboard ID: https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/?dataSource=prometheus

SetUp Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA):

Horizontal scaling means that the response to increased load is to deploy more Pods. This is different from vertical scaling, which for Kubernetes would mean assigning more resources (for example: memory or CPU) to the Pods that are already running for the workload.


#run the following command to enable metrics-server:
minikube addons enable metrics-server

#Run and expose hello-minikube server 

vim deployment.yml

----------

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: hello-minikube
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: hello-minikube
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: hello-minikube
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: hello-minikube
        image: laly9999/coming-soon-website:2
        resources:
          requests:
            cpu: "100m"   # Request 100 milliCPU (0.1 CPU core)
            memory: "128Mi"   # Request 128 MiB of memory
          limits:
            cpu: "500m"   # Limit to 500 milliCPU (0.5 CPU core)
            memory: "256Mi"   # Limit to 256 MiB of memory

-----------------------

kubectl apply -f deployment.yml

------------------------

vim service.yml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: hello-minikube-service
spec:
  selector:
    app: hello-minikube   # This should match the labels in your deployment
  ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 3005   # Port exposed by the service on the cluster
      targetPort: 3000   # Port the service forwards traffic to in the pods
      nodePort: 30000   # Port exposed on the nodes of the cluster (30000-32767 range)
  type: NodePort   # Type of service

--------------------

kubectl apply -f service.yml

------------------------


# Create an HPA for the hello-minikube deployment
vim hpa.yml
-----------------
apiVersion: autoscaling/v2
kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
metadata:
  name: hello-minikube
  namespace: default
spec:
  scaleTargetRef:
    apiVersion: apps/v1
    kind: Deployment
    name: hello-minikube
  minReplicas: 1
  maxReplicas: 20
  metrics:
  - type: Resource
    resource:
      name: cpu
      target:
        type: Utilization
        averageUtilization: 50

-----------
kubectl apply -f hpa.yaml

---------------------
#kubectl edit hpa hello-minikube  #to update

#check the current status of the newly-made HorizontalPodAutoscaler
kubectl get hpa

minikube ip
kubectl get services

#Increase the load
kubectl run -i --tty load-generator --rm --image=laly9999/coming-soon-website:2 --restart=Never -- /bin/sh -c "while sleep 0.01; do wget -q -O- http://192.168.49.2:30000/; done"



#To temporarily disable the HPA and manually set the desired replica count,
kubectl delete hpa hello-minikube
kubectl scale deployment hello-minikube --replicas=1
kubectl apply -f hpa.yaml