cwiederspan / aks-walkthrough

A walkthrough for creating and managing an AKS cluster from a development and DevOps point-of-view.

Azure AKS Walkthrough

A walkthrough for creating and managing an AKS cluster from a development and DevOps point-of-view.

Intro

Name: Chris Wiederspan
Role: Microsoft Azure App Dev Specialist
Email: [email protected]

Prerequisites

You will also need a full, working Azure subscription so you can create your own cluster to test on. We will also use Azure Cloud Shell as part of this excercise, so make sure you can access your subscription through both the Azure Portal and with cloud shell.

git clone https://github.com/cwiederspan/aks-walkthrough.git

AKS/Kubernetes Setup

Task 1: Create the AKS Cluster

1. Create two variables that you will use when creating your cluster.

   CLUSTER_NAME="cdw-aks-20180816"  
   CLUSTER_LOCATION="WESTUS2"

2. Create a Azure Resource Group that will contain the AKS cluster.

   az group create --name $CLUSTER_NAME --location $CLUSTER_LOCATION

3. Create the AKS Cluster using the CLI.

   az aks create --resource-group $CLUSTER_NAME --name $CLUSTER_NAME --location $CLUSTER_LOCATION 
   --node-count 2 --node-vm-size Standard_DS2_v2 --dns-name-prefix $CLUSTER_NAME --generate-ssh-keys 
   --enable-addons http_application_routing --kubernetes-version 1.11.1 --no-wait

   NOTE: This will take several minutes, so use the --no-wait so you can continue to use the shell while we are waiting.

4. Monitor the status of the cluster while waiting for it to finish provisioning.

   az aks list -o table
   

Task 2: Manage AKS with Kubectl

After several minutes, when your AKS cluster has finished creating, we need to wire it up to the Kubernetes CLI - kubectl. Luckily, using cloud shell to do this is very easy.

1. Get AKS credentials for kubectl.

   az aks get-credentials -n $CLUSTER_NAME -g $CLUSTER_NAME

2. Confirm kubectl is connected and configured correctly.

   kubectl config view

Task 3: Install Helm/Tiller

1. Because we setup our cluster using RBAC above, we need to create a service account and binding so that Helm (on our dev machine or cloud shell) can talk to Tiller (on the cluster).

   kubectl create -f utilities\helm-rbac.yaml

2. Now that we can connect to the cluster, let's initialize Helm in our cloud shell, and Tiller on the cluster.

   helm init --service-account tiller

Task 4: Create a New Project

1. Use the cli to create a new .NET Core project (or use the existing content in the src folder).

   mkdir newsrc
   cd newsrc
   curl -o .gitignore https://www.gitignore.io/api/visualstudio%2Cvisualstudiocode
   dotnet new razor
   draft create --app aksdevopsdemo --pack csharp
   touch azure-pipelines.yaml
   code .

Before we go further, let's create a new namespace that we will use later on when we wire up our Dev Space.

kubectl create namespace dev

You can find out more about Dev Spaces here. They allow you to deploy and debug your project code to an AKS cluster right from Visual Studio or VS Code. This becomes invaluable when you need developing a microservice-based application that relies on dozens of microservice components that aren't practical to install on every developer's local machine.

Using the dev namespace that we setup above, setup your cluster to use Dev Spaces.

az aks use-dev-spaces -g $CLUSTER_NAME -n $CLUSTER_NAME // TODO: Does this need to be run on local machine vs. cloud shell

*** Create AKS Project in Visual Studio ***

*** Deploy to AKS Using Helm ***

draft init

helm repo add helm-demo-site https://github.com/cwiederspan/helm-demo-site

kubectl get all --all-namespaces
kubectl get nodes
kubectl get namespaces
kubectl get pods
kubectl get services