Bootstrapping Kubernetes: Hand-on approach to understand the k8s architecture

Now a days a lot of organisations are using Kubernetes on daily basis. It has become the de facto standard for managing container at scale. All the major cloud providers also provide Kubernetes as one of the service for running the client applications.

For majority of you, be it a developer or DevOps engineering, interacting with Kubernetes must be part of your daily work. Due to this it is essential to understand how Kubernetes component works.

In this talk, we will explore the Kubernetes architecture mainly through its components. What are these components, how are they setup and what are responsibilities of all these components.

But instead of going through the component diagram and talking about these. We will start with an empty Kubernetes nodes. We will try to deploy a simple pod on this node. This will obviously not work due to absence of k8s components. But we will let the errors guide our journey into discovering the missing components. For every error we will install what is missing and progress. We will complete this jigsaw puzzle installing one component at a time and solving one error at a time and hopefully learning how k8s components actually work and communicate with each other.

We won't go in details of every components, but main focus on the talk will be on bootstrapping the node to make the setup work.

We will be using Kubeadm as a tool to bootstrap the cluster node. We will not look at every steps required while setting up the cluster but the main focus will be on important Kubernetes components.

Takeaways From The Talk
You will get to know about

• How the k8s node works.
• What is a k8s control node consists of.
• What every k8s component does and is required for.
• How to see how to discover the errors and debug the issues (as part of the talk we will have to debug some errors).

About the Speaker
Prashant Kalkar has over 18 years of hands-on experience in technologies like Java, Scala, Spring, Kubernetes, Kafka etc. He has experience in the development, architecture as well as DevOps streams. He helps organisations in adopting agile practices and continuous delivery. He has given talks on SOLID principles, functional programming, Immutable infrastructure with Terraform and consumer driven contracts in the past.

Prerequisites for Attendees
This talk is targeted for developers and DevOps engineers who have bit of familiarity with Kubernetes but want to learn more about internal working of the k8s components. Knowing following things would help you understand concepts clearly:

• Familiarity with high level k8s architecture will be useful.
• Preliminary familiarity of docker and Docker CLI.
• We will be using Kubeadm but no knowledge of Kubeadm is required and its not the focus on the talk. The k8s components are what we will focus.
• Pre-talk setup will be done using Terraform and bash script. If you need to go through it you will need understanding for the same. But this is not part of the talk and hence these are not required to attend the talk itself.