Today, most organizations are moving to Managed Services like EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Services), and AKS (Azure Kubernetes Services), for easier handling of the Kubernetes Cluster. With Managed Kubernetes we do not have to take care of our Master Nodes, cloud providers will be responsible for all Master Nodes and Worker Nodes, freeing up our time. We just need to deploy our Microservices over the Worker nodes. You can pay extra to achieve an uptime of 99.95%. Node repair ensures that a cluster remains healthy and reduces the chances of possible downtime. This is good in many cases but it makes it an expensive ordeal as AKS costs $0.10 per cluster per hour. You have to install upgrades for the VPC CNI yourself and also, install Calico CNI. There is no IDE extension for developing EKS code. it also creates a dependency on the particular Cloud Provider.
To skip the dependency on any Cloud Provider we have to create a Vanilla Kubernetes Cluster. This means we have to take care of all the components – all the Master and Worker Nodes of the Cluster by ourselves.
Here we got a scenario in which one of our client’s requirements was to set up a Kubernetes cluster over On-premises Servers, under the condition of no Internet connectivity. So I choose to perform the setup of the Kubernetes Cluster via Kubespray.
Why Kubespray?
Kubespray is a composition of Ansible playbooks, inventory,
provisioning tools, and domain knowledge for generic
OS/Kubernetes clusters configuration management tasks.
Kubespray provides a highly available cluster, composable
(choice of the network plugin for instance), supports most popular Linux distributions, and continuous integration tests.