Week 1 Study Progress for CKA Exam

Kind installation and K8s local cluster setup on Arch Linux

Introduction

This week marks the beginning of my journey towards becoming a Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA). I focused on setting up my local environment and getting familiar with basic Kubernetes commands. Here’s a summary of what I accomplished in Week 1.

Setting Up Kind on Linux

To start with Kubernetes, I chose to use Kind, a tool for running local Kubernetes clusters using Docker container nodes. It’s a great way to get hands-on experience with Kubernetes without the need for cloud infrastructure. Here are the steps I followed:

Installing Kind

First, I installed Kind on my Arch Linux machine using the following commands:

# For AMD64 / x86_64
[ $(uname -m) = x86_64 ] && curl -Lo ./kind https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/dl/v0.23.0/kind-linux-amd64

# For ARM64
[ $(uname -m) = aarch64 ] && curl -Lo ./kind https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/dl/v0.23.0/kind-linux-arm64

chmod +x ./kind
sudo mv ./kind /usr/local/bin/kind

Creating Clusters

Before this step, you need to make sure that the docker is installed in your local machine. If you haven’t installed docker yet, please follow the steps mentioned below:

To install Docker on an Arch Linux system, you can follow these steps:

# Update your system
sudo pacman -Syu

# Install Docker
sudo pacman -S docker 

# Start Docker service
sudo systemctl start docker

# Enable Docker service to start on boot
sudo systemctl enable docker

# Add current user to the Docker group
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

# Log out and log back in to apply group changes (manual step)

# Test Docker installation
sudo docker run hello-world

After installing Kind, I created two clusters:

kind create cluster --image kindest/node:v1.30.0@sha256:047357ac0cfea04663786a612ba1eaba9702bef25227a794b52890dd8bcd692e
 --name kind-cka-cluster1 #you can give whatever name,I just gave name as cka-cluster1 here

kind create cluster --image kindest/node:v1.30.0@sha256:047357ac0cfea04663786a612ba1eaba9702bef25227a794b52890dd8bcd692e
 --name kind-cka-cluster2

#checkout kind official documentation for the image name

• If you do the above steps, it will create clusters with 1 node (control plane)
• If you want to create multi node clusters, for example, create a file named config.yaml and add the below content:

touch config.yaml #creating a file named config.yaml
vim config.yaml     
# and type i to go to insert mode and then add the yaml content below


# three node (two workers) cluster config
kind: Cluster
apiVersion: kind.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4
nodes:
- role: control-plane
- role: worker
- role: worker

#then save by pressing esc and type :wq!

kind create cluster --image kindest/node:v1.30.0@sha256:047357ac0cfea04663786a612ba1eaba9702bef25227a794b52890dd8bcd692e
 --name kind-cka-cluster3 --config config.yaml

Switching Between Clusters

With multiple clusters set up, I needed to switch between them using kubectl. Before that If you haven't installed kubectl on your machine, follow these steps:

Installing kubectl on Arch Linux

# Update your system
sudo pacman -Syu 

# Install kubectl
sudo pacman -S kubectl 

# Verify kubectl installation
kubectl version --client

Now I need to switch between the two clusters using kubectl, let's do that:

# List all contexts
kubectl config get-contexts

# Switch to a specific context
kubectl config use-context kind-cka-cluster2 

Checking Cluster Nodes

To ensure that my clusters were up and running, I used the following command to display information about the nodes:

kubectl get nodes