Kubernetes Local Development With Minikube on Hyper-V Windows 10

Most software development is currently done online, especially development that requires Kubernetes and the cloud. In many cases when developers travel and don’t have reliable access to the Internet, it's good to have a local development environment that can be run on a laptop and provide basic Kubernetes setup to continue the development process in a more productive way.

In this article, I show how minikube allows you to run functional Kubernetes as single node cluster on a laptop in Windows 10 using Hyper-V Hypervisor.

Let’s start by installing and configuring minikube with Grafana, Prometheus, Helm, and Istio on Windows 10.

Prerequisites for Development Machine Environment

• VT-x/AMD-v virtualization must be enabled in BIOS (requires machine restart)
• Enable Hyper-V: Go to "Windows features On or Off," and you will see a dialog box with a list of Windows features as shown below. Navigate to the Hyper-V section and enable it (requires machine restart).

Hyper-V Installation

Hyper-V is included with Windows since Windows Server 2008 as well as Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 in the Pro versions. It can be enabled from Control Panel at “Turn Windows features On or Off” under “Programs and Features.” Activate the “Hyper-V” checkbox, apply the change, and follow the directions on-screen.

Network Configuration

First, you must configure a new virtual switch so that your virtual machine will be able to connect to the Internet. Once Hyper-V is enabled, start the Hyper-V Manager.

Configuration can be done in GUI by opening PowerShell as Administrator and running Hyper-V Manager

mmc.exe virtmgmt.msc

Or we can use only PowerShell for the rest of the configurations.

Creating External Switch

Using PowerShell (run as Administrator)

• Get a list of the network adapters in the host. In a laptop, you should typically see "Ethernet" and "Wi-Fi"

Get-NetAdapter

• Create the external switch with a name of VM-External-Switch, bound to the network adapter named Wi-Fi retrieved from the previous command. You may need to change your -NetAdapterName to an interface connected to the internet.

New-VMSwitch -name ExternalSwitch  -NetAdapterName "Ethernet 3"  -AllowManagementOS $true

The easiest way to install minikube is to deployed from choco.

Chocolatey is a package manager for Windows (like apt-get or yum but for Windows). It was designed to be a decentralized framework for quickly installing applications and tools that you need. It is built on the NuGet infrastructure currently using PowerShell as its focus for delivering packages.

Follow the Installation Guide or follow the below PowerShell commands

Using PowerShell (run as Administrator):

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString(‘https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

Using cmd (run as Administrator):

@”%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe” -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command “iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString(‘https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET “PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin”

Once installed check for any Upgrades available for Chocolatey:

choco upgrade chocolatey

Install kubectl cli:

choco install kubernetes-cli

Install minikube:

Using PowerShell (run as Administrator):

choco install minikube

Test minikube installation:

minikube version

Check available Version of Kubernetes:

minikube get-k8s-versions

Update minikube:

minikube update-check

Initiate minikube

Check available initialization options:

minikube.exe start — help

•  vm-driver Hyper-V : Specifies Hypervisor driver to be used
•  cpus 4 : Specifies number of CPU “cores” allocation, if not specified, “Default is 2”
•  memory=4096 : Specifies the amount of RAM allocated, if not specified, “Default is 2048”
•  hyperv-virtual-switch “VM-External-Switch” : Specify virtual network switch to be used “VM-External-Switch was created in previous steps”
•  kubernetes-version string : Specify version of Kubernetes to be installed (ex. v1.2.3)

Post Install minikube

• Stop minikube k8s VM

minikube stop

Disable Dynamic RAM allocation in Hyper V

Set-VMMemory minikube -DynamicMemoryEnabled $false

Start minikube k8s VM

minikube start

Deploy additional Kubernetes components

List minikube addons

minikube addons list

Enable Hipster for cluster performance monitoring

minikube addons enable heapster

Post Install checks minikube

Check minikube status

minikube status
minikube service list

Launch Kubernetes dashboard

minikube dashboard

Check dashboard URL

minikube dashboard — url

Ssh into minikube

minikube ssh

Run kubectl commands against minikube

kubectl config use-context minikube
kubectl config current-context
kubectl get po -n kube-system
kubectl get po — all-namespaces
kubectl get all — all-namespaces
kubectl api-versions | grep rbac
kubectl version
kubectl cluster-info
kubectl api-versions

Test minikube Kubernetes deployment

kubectl run hello-minikube — image=k8s.gcr.io/echoserver:1.4 — port=8080 
kubectl expose deployment hello-minikube — type=NodePort
kubectl get services
kubectl get deploy
kubectl get pod

Find IP

minikube ip

Find mapped port

kubectl describe service hello-minikube
kubectl get svc hello-minikube

curl http://$IP:$PORT

Remove testing deployment

kubectl delete services hello-minikube
kubectl delete deployment hello-minikube

eval $(minikube docker-env)
docker info

Minikube Add-Ons

List minikube available addons

minikube addons list

Enable Ingress for minikube K8s

minikube addons enable ingress

Enable Elastic Fluentd Kibana

minikube addons enable efk

Install Helm cli and initialise tiller

choco install kubernetes-helmhelm init

Post Helm installation configuration

kubectl — namespace=kube-system edit deployment/tiller-deploy

Change automountServiceAccountToken  to true 

automountServiceAccountToken true

Or you can do it in one liner

kubectl patch deploy --namespace kube-system tiller-deploy -p '{"spec":{"template":{"spec":{"automountServiceAccountToken":true}}}}'

Check Helm installation

helm versionhelm search
kubectl get svc -n kube-system
helm ls — debug

Upgrade Helm

helm init --upgrade

Helm update repositories

helm repo update

Let’s try to deploy some packages and inspect using MySQL as an example.

helm inspect stable/mysql
helm install stable/mysql

Install helm packages for Prometheus and Grafana.

helm install stable/prometheus
helm install stable/grafana

Get Access to Prometheus.

• Get the Prometheus server URL

• Get POD_NAME   for running Prometheus server

kubectl get pods — namespace default -l “app=prometheus,component=server” -o jsonpath=”{.items[0].metadata.name}”

Note: Replace $POD_NAME   with output from previous command

kubectl — namespace default port-forward $POD_NAME 9090

Get the Alertmanager URL

Get POD_NAME   for running Prometheus alert manager

kubectl get pods — namespace default -l “app=prometheus,component=alertmanager” -o jsonpath=”{.items[0].metadata.name}”

   Note: Replace $POD_NAME with  output from previous command  

kubectl — namespace default port-forward $POD_NAME 9093

Get the PushGateway URL

Get POD_NAME   for running Prometheus push gateway

kubectl get pods — namespace default -l “app=prometheus,component=pushgateway” -o jsonpath=”{.items[0].metadata.name}”

Replace $POD_NAME   with output from previous command

kubectl — namespace default port-forward $POD_NAME 9091

Get Access to Grafana

Get your ‘admin’ user password in base64 and decode by running:

Note: This works only under Linux.

kubectl get secret — namespace default interested-moth-grafana -o jsonpath=”{.data.admin-password}” | base64 — decode ; echo

• Get the Grafana URL

• Get POD_NAME   for running Grafana

kubectl get pods — namespace default -l “app=grafana” -o jsonpath=”{.items[0].metadata.name}”

  Note: Replace $POD_NAME   with the output from the previous command. 

kubectl — namespace default port-forward $POD_NAME 3000

Deploy k8s dashboard for docker k8s “minikube comes with dashboard deployed”

helm install stable/kubernetes-dashboard
kubectl proxy

In web browser use below link to access Kubernetes dashboard:

http://localhost:8001/ui

Or open in browser

http://localhost:8001/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/https:kubernetes-dashboard:/proxy/

Get Istio installation.

git clone https://github.com/istio/istio.git 
cd istio
kubectl create -f install/kubernetes/helm/helm-service-account.yaml
helm init — service-account tiller
helm install install/kubernetes/helm/istio — name istio
helm delete — purge istio