Installing kubernetes on my own hardware

Question

I need to install a k8s cluster on my own hardware running ubuntu 18 and 19. No cloud will be involved. I've read about JuJu, but it seems very oriented to various clouds. I haven't seen anything about using JuJu to install kubernetes on my own hardware. The JuJu install doce mention installing on your own metal, but only include instructions for the cloud (AWS) or for installing microk8s on localhost. It also talks about charmed kubernetes, whatver that is. It seems like the marketing department wrote these docs.

I want to install real kubernetes, not some knock-off, and I'm wondering if JuJu is made for creating a k8s cluster on my own hardware. If so, where is this procedure documented?

Answer 1

Tim from the Juju team here. Yes, you're definitely able to install Kubernetes on your own hardware. The docs are unclear and that's our fault.

The recommended approach is to:

1. Install MAAS on your computers to turn them into a "cloud"
2. Install Juju on the machine that you wish to control your cluster
3. Run juju add-cloud to register your cluster with Juju (detailed instructions for registering a MAAS cluster with Juju are available)
4. Run juju deploy charmed-kubernetes after looking through the detailed manual installation instructions that describe how to customise the deployment for your needs

You will now have a standards-compliant Kubernetes cluster on your own hardware, for free.

Why the confusion? Well, the term "cloud" in the documentation is misleading. A "cloud" in Juju-parlance is jargon. It indicates a deployment target. Juju clouds are not tied to virtual machines living in the public cloud.

In that document that you posted, the section that you are looking for is "Multi node cluster".

You'll see MAAS (Metal as a Service) and Manual "clouds". Both of those "clouds" are bare-metal hosts.

• the Manual cloud only requires SSH access to the hosts that you're intending on deploying to. Machines that it accesses become a compute cluster.
• MAAS turns bare-metal machines into a cloud-like environment. It is very powerful and gives you control over networking and storage (which is not available with the Manual cloud.