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Create a Kubernetes cluster using kind (Kubernetes in Docker) in less than 2 minutes



Why

Sometimes I just need to quickly test a K8s resource or compare a cluster with a near vanilla version. This is where kind comes in handy, as it can create a clean and fresh Kubernetes cluster in under 2 minutes.

Requirements

You have a working docker environment.

Step 1

Download the kind binary (less than 4 MB).

curl -Lso ./kind https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/dl/v0.11.0/kind-linux-amd64 && chmod 755 kind

Step 2

Create the actual cluster.

$ time ./kind create cluster

Creating cluster "kind" ...
 ✓ Ensuring node image (kindest/node:v1.21.1)
 ✓ Preparing nodes
 ✓ Writing configuration
 ✓ Starting control-plane
 ✓ Installing CNI
 ✓ Installing StorageClass

Set kubectl context to "kind-kind"
You can now use your cluster with:
kubectl cluster-info --context kind-kind

Have a question, bug, or feature request? Let us know! https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/#community

real    1m55.934s
user    0m1.014s
sys     0m0.970s

Step 3

That's it really - just use kubectl  (ideally use the same version as the K8s cluster  - so 1.21.1 in this example) as described above.

$ kubectl get nodes
NAME                 STATUS   ROLES                  AGE   VERSION
kind-control-plane   Ready    control-plane,master   42m   v1.21.1

When finished, either stop / remove the Docker container or run kind delete cluster.

Without pulling the image

Starting kind a second time is even faster:



Links

https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/docs/user/quick-start/

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