Having succeeded in getting a small K8s cluster running I then considered the fact that I had to use a specific version of the packages and a specific version of Docker. Could I upgrade to the latest releases?
First I cloned the working machines, then attempted the upgrade, and broke everything. That is pretty damn fragile! I then began to wonder if I need to consider the operating system of the host machines. Ubuntu is not one that is preferred. What are?
- centOS
- Tinycore
- Rancher
I first tried Rancher. I built a VM and started it with success. But then I discovered I need other tooling and it suddenly got very complex. So I shelved that idea for the moment.
Then I got “CentOS 7”. The installer was very good, beating Ubuntu into said “cocked hat”. Once running it looks very sound. I’ve built a base image to clone into the working machines as I need them. The installer is not up-to-date, with 225 updates to install. Its memory hungry. My stock 2Gb of RAM needs more.
Then “Tinycore”, and it is. 21Mb download came in, in a blink of an eye. This should be interesting if it works. Nope, wrong one, that is the desktop version. The server version is 16Mb. Got that running. Its very querky but it does work.
Centos 7. The installer is brilliant and beats Ubuntu hands down. The machine runs fine. Different tooling as it is a “Red Hat” distribution rather than a “Debian” distribution. “apt” becomes “yum”. Tried to build me a K8s cluster. It all went very wrong. Turns out the K8s repository, which is hosted by Google is somewhat empty.
Since then I have looked around and found more detailed installation instructions. I’m going to try again when I find some spare energy.
