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Getting started with Google Container Engine and Kubernetes

Mainly a cheatsheet for myself, work in progress.

Create a Cluster

You should probably create a new project first. Then the easiest way is to just do it through the Google Cloud UI, and choose your cluster size, zone(s), etc. This is pretty straightforward.

Install CLI

You need gcloud SDK and kubectl. Documentation can be found at https://cloud.google.com/sdk/downloads. Those can be installed with:

curl https://sdk.cloud.google.com | bash
exec -l $SHELL
gcloud init

Now install the kubectl component:

gcloud components update kubectl

Start a kubernetes proxy and access the UI

I'm not sure if it's because I'm running from a remote terminal, or if the instructions given in the developer console are incorrect or incomplete, but I had to setup the application-default login stuff in addition to the gcloud init to make the kubectl work. Otherwise it would return the following:

$ kubectl proxy
Unable to connect to the server: oauth2: cannot fetch token: 400 Bad Request
Response: {
  "error" : "invalid_grant"
}

So here are the commands I had to enter:

gcloud auth application-default login # go through the OAuth dance again
gcloud container clusters get-credentials cluster-name --zone us-central1-b
kubectl proxy # or kubectl proxy --address=0.0.0.0 --accept-hosts=your-ip-or-domain-name if need to make it available to the world

Yeah! We can see the Kubernetes dashboard with all the pods and replication sets and services running on my cluster.

Next, I'll try to see if I can easily start a full application from an existing docker-compose file.