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The Ansible server isn’t part of the Kubernetes cluster, but it’s in the same network and what I used to set up the four cluster nodes. Initially, I wanted to use Ansible to provision the servers and to set up everything end to end, but I ended up only using it to provision the servers and not using it to set up Kubernetes because I ran into configuration issues with my initial setup. I couldn’t join the worker nodes to the cluster successfully via Ansible, so I decided to set up Kubernetes manually to get the cluster up and running. For future setups, I’ll use the official K3S Ansible playbook, which should take care of the issues I faced.
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MetalLB needs a pool of IP addresses it can use for the cluster. I reserved 5 IP addresses between 10.0.0.5 and 10.0.0.10, which were not part of my dnsmasq DHCP pool. Assigning IPs outside the DHCP range prevents conflicts with dynamically assigned IPs in the network. A single IP address would have sufficed for my simple set-up, but I plan to add more services to the cluster and I might need distinct IPs for each. I created the following custom resource to configure MetalLB and named the file metallb-config.yaml:
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With everything installed, my four-node cluster was up and running. The picture below shows the output of running kubectl get nodes, a command that shows the health and status of a Kubernetes Cluster. There are three worker nodes and one master node. I named the nodes after planets from the Transformers franchise because I like Transformers and one of the apps I planned to deploy to this cluster is asearchable Transformers APIand database that I’m building.
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I used K3S in my cluster because it is a lightweight, stripped-down version of Kubernetes that’s ideal for running on resource-constrained devices like Raspberry PIs I plan to use in my home lab cluster. K3S can be installed through a shell script:
