Easiest Single Node Kubernetes Cluster

As some of you might know, we’ve launched PWK (play-with-k8s) this past week and the traction has been very positive so far. Here are some preliminary analytics numbers we can share:

We couldn’t be happier with the first impression as the numbers resulted much better than expected. Even so, we’re constantly looking for improvements and new ways to help the community getting started with the technology. That’s why after receiving some feedback from the first iteration we’d like to introduce two new features that we believe will take the experience to the next level.

First, we’ve added support to upload files into our playgrounds by just drag & dropping one or several files into the terminal. The main reason for this is because we saw that in the K8s world people usually configure resources with the well known command kubectl apply -f and PWK currently doesn’t offer a nice way to handle that; you’d have to either use a terminal editor like vim or nano, or upload the file to somewhere and fetch it using curl or wget. Here’s a brief screencast about how the feature looks like:

The second feature is something that we hope will simplify even more the way to get started in PWK and K8s. We actually got inspired by a recent tutorial written by Kelsey Hightower (https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubeadm-single-node-cluster) that shows how to bootstrap a single K8s node cluster using kubeadm and GCP. We wanted to take that same concept and allow anyone even without a GCP account to try it out, that’s why we adapted it to PWK and within 30 seconds you can get a fully functional single node cluster to follow Kelsey’s examples. One important thing to remark here is that you’ll be doing everything from your local machine and you can see at the same time in the PWD interface how changes are being reflected. Here’s a video showing how the tutorial works:

Hope you find these features useful and please let us know if there’s something you think we could do to make the experience even better.

The PW[D,M,K] team!.