Have you ever wanted to try K3s high availability cluster “mode,” and you either did not have the minimum three “spare nodes” or the time required to set up the same amount of VMs? Then you are in for a good treat: meet k3d!
If you’re not familiar with k3d, its name gives you a hint to what it’s all about: K3s in Docker. k3d is a lightweight wrapper to run K3s (a lightweight, single <40MB binary, certified Kubernetes distribution developed by Rancher Labs and now a CNCF sandbox project) in Docker. With k3d, it’s easy to create single- and multi-node K3s clusters in Docker, for local development on Kubernetes.
k3d allows you to start a K3s cluster in literally no time. Plus, you can learn its few, but powerful, commands very quickly. k3d runs in Docker, which allows you to scale up and scale down nodes without further setup. In this blog, we’ll cover setting up a single-node K3s cluster using k3d and then walk through the steps for setting up K3s in high availability mode using k3d.
The tutorial then covers:
- Prerequisites (Docker and a Linux shell)
- Step 1: Start with Installation
- Step 2: Start Small with a Single-Node Cluster
- Step 3: Welcome to the HA World
While we created a single node and an HA cluster locally, inside containers, we can still see how K3s behaves with the new etcd embedded DB. If we deployed K3s on bare metal or virtual machines, it would act the same way. Yuo will also get detailed screen shots, example code and links to further reading. Nice one!
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