CKS Exam Prep: Kubeadm VM
in Azure
If you want to prepare for the CKS exam, you’ll need a VM to learn on! Here’s I show you how to create a VM in Azure easily and ready to go. This blog is part of a series, check here the index.
The Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) exam is a recently released certification from the Linux Foundation meant to test your skills to create and secure an hardened Kubernetes cluster. The cluster you’ll have to deal with during the exam are deployed with the standard, official Kubernetes community tool kubeadm; hence, you’ll be better off studying for the exam on the real deal than other distributions (although there are really good ones out there, like KIND).
Since I ❤ Azure, I want to share with you an effortless way to quickly obtain a VM running in Azure with Kubeadm, using containerd as container runtime (that’s what you’ll get during the exam) and canal (calico+flannel) as CNI (so you can use NetworkPolicies). Ready? Let’s start
First download the script:
wget http://bit.ly/kubeadm-containerdThen create a resource group in Azure and deploy the Virtual Machine pointing to the script as custom-data:
az group create -n cksaz vm create -g cks -n cks '\
--image UbuntuLTS \
--ssh-key-values ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub \
--admin-username cks \
--size Standard_B4ms \
--custom-data kubeadm-containerd.sh
Voila’! In a few minutes you’ll be able to SSH into the VM and enjoy a fully functional 1-node kubeadm cluster with containerd and canal. Here’s how you do that:
> ssh csk@<VM IP>
# sudo su
$ export KUBECONFIG=/etc/kubernetes/admin.conf
$ alias k=kubectl$ k get no -o wide
NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION INTERNAL-IP EXTERNAL-IP OS-IMAGE KERNEL-VERSION CONTAINER-RUNTIME
cks Ready control-plane,master 120m v1.20.1 10.0.0.4 <none> Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS 5.4.0-1031-azure containerd://1.3.3
Update!
I created a Terraform template to deploy a multinode (1 controller + N nodes in VM Scale Set) using Kubeadm+containerd in Azure here.
