cluster-api-provider-kind (capk)

Declarative management of Kind clusters using Kubernetes resources, leveraging cluster-api.

Compatibility / Requirements

• cluster-api >= v0.4 (Cluster API v1alpha4)
• Kind >= v0.9.0
• A Kind cluster running at least Kubernetes 1.16

Features

• Native Kubernetes manifests and API
• Manages the creation of clusters using Kind
• Specify the number of control plane nodes (replicas)
• Choice of Kubernetes version to create
• Specify Kubernetes feature gates and runtime config

Installation

1. Ensure you already have installed Kind and clusterctl.

2. Create a new Kind cluster to use as the management cluster

   kind create cluster --name management-cluster
   

3. Install cluster-api

   clusterctl init
   

4. Install cluster-api-provider-kind into the management cluster

   make install deploy
   

5. Run the Kind API server on the host machine

   make run-server
   

6. Apply cluster manifest

   echo 'apiVersion: cluster.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4
   kind: Cluster
   metadata:
     name: workload-cluster
   spec:
     clusterNetwork:
       pods:
         cidrBlocks: ["192.168.0.0/16"]
     infrastructureRef:
       apiVersion: infrastructure.cluster.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4
       kind: KindCluster
       name: workload-cluster
   ---
   apiVersion: infrastructure.cluster.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4
   kind: KindCluster
   metadata:
     name: workload-cluster
   spec:
     replicas: 1' | k apply -f -
   

Limitations

There are a few limitations that you need to be aware of:

• Kind doesn't provide any way of modifying the config of a running cluster so updates to a KindCluster have no effect on the underlying cluster.
• Kind requires the Docker binary to function. Kind itself uses CRI / Containerd rather than Docker so the provider requires a REST API server running on the host to interact with Kind.