kubespray VS kops

When it came to deployment, I had several options, and I chose the hard way: deploying Kubernetes on bare metal nodes using KubeSpray. Troubleshooting bare metal Kubernetes deployments honed my skills in pinpointing issues. This hands-on experience provided a deep understanding of how each component, like the Control Plane, kubelet, Container Runtime, and scheduler, interacts to orchestrate containers.

Worth noting that if you like ansible, Kubespray has had documented air-gap installation since 2018 https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray/commit/963c3479...

calico v3.7.3 kubernetes v1.16.0 installed via kubespray https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray

About 1yr ago I ran k8s with 300 nodes using kube spray https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray . Never had any real issue with it. We did finally move to the cloud though.

I would highly recommend https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray

We build our own distro called Compliant Kubernetes, and we use (a fork of) kubespray to install the base Kubernetes layer. Our distro is entirely open source, so you can use it as a reference, if you want.

If you want to run Kubernetes on VM's you can look into kubespray and play around with the options for installing and checking the configuration after the fact.

The general problem of patching resource definitions that are not fully under your control has also been recognized for some time. This is true of default resources created and updated by cluster maintenance tools (e.g. kOps), or by public helm charts that you use to install common services and operators (e.g. nginx-ingress, cert-manager, and so on). High quality charts will allow you to override the configuration of important components such as service account references, but some simpler charts offer much less configuration.

The kops documentation is not very clear about this.

Very fast progress and great article with lots of useful information. I found myself nodding a lot having recently seen GitLab Dedicated https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/subscriptions/gitlab_dedicated/ being developed that had my similar challenges. I wonder what other people think of Kops https://kops.sigs.k8s.io/

note: I work with kube on a daily basis. All current clusters under my care use a managed backplane service though there are a number of small (3+ years-old) clusters that I still keep an eye on that were initialized using kops.

kOps with your own instances.

Companies run their own clusters (sometimes for cost reasons), using tools like kops, and kubeadm to set up their own clusters.

curl -Lo kops https://github.com/kubernetes/kops/releases/download/$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/kubernetes/kops/releases/latest | grep tag_name | cut -d '"' -f 4)/kops-linux-amd64 chmod +x kops sudo mv kops /usr/local/bin/

Kops is a cluster setup and management command line tool that deploys a Kubernetes cluster to AWS. It provides configuration abstractions such as manifest YAML files that facilitate node and components configuration. And like Ansible, it will provide dry-run capabilities and ensures idempotency of changing the nodes.