Install Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform (KKP) CE

Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform (KKP) is a Kubernetes management platform that helps address the operational and security challenges of enterprise customers seeking to run Kubernetes at scale. KKP automates deployment and operations of hundreds or thousands of Kubernetes clusters across hybrid-cloud, multi-cloud and edge environments while enabling DevOps teams with a self-service developer and operations portal. If you are looking for more general information on KKP, we recommend our documentation start page and the Architecture section of the documentation to get familiar with KKP’s core concepts.

This chapter explains the installation procedure of KKP into a pre-existing Kubernetes cluster using KKP’s installer (called kubermatic-installer). KKP can be installed on any infrastructure provider that can host a Kubernetes cluster, i.e. any major cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Digital Ocean or Hetzner. Private infrastructure providers like vSphere, OpenStack or Nutanix are supported as well, e.g. by using KubeOne. See Set up Kubernetes for details.

Typically the setup of KKP cluster, including creation of a base Kubernetes cluster on which KKP is deployed, should be no more than 2 hours. Inclusive of preparation of the Infrastructure.

Expected skills and knowledge for the installation: moderate level of familiarity with cloud services (like AWS, Azure, GCP or others) and familiarity with container and Kubernetes technologies, constructs, and configurations.

Terminology

In this chapter, you will find the following KKP-specific terms:

• Master Cluster – A Kubernetes cluster which is responsible for storing central information about users, projects and SSH keys. It hosts the KKP master components and might also act as a seed cluster.
• Seed Cluster – A Kubernetes cluster which is responsible for hosting the control plane components (kube-apiserver, kube-scheduler, kube-controller-manager, etcd and more) of a User Cluster.
• User Cluster – A Kubernetes cluster created and managed by KKP, hosting applications managed by users.

It is also recommended to make yourself familiar with our architecture documentation.

Requirements

For this guide you need to have kubectl and Helm (version 3) installed locally. You should be familiar with core Kubernetes concepts and the YAML file format before proceeding.

In addition, we recommend familiarizing yourself with the resource quota system of your infrastructure provider. It is important to provide enough capacity to let KKP provision infrastructure for your future user clusters, but also to enforce a maximum to protect against overspending.

Plan Your Architecture

Before getting started we strongly recommend you to think ahead and model your KKP setup. In particular you should decide if you want Master and Seed components to share the same cluster (a shared Master/Seed setup) or run Master and Seed on two separate clusters. See our architecture overview for a visual representation of the KKP architecture. A shared Master/Seed is useful for getting up and running quickly, while separate clusters will allow to scale your KKP environment better.

Depending on which choice you make, you will need to have either one or two Kubernetes clusters available before starting with the KKP setup.

If you would like to run multiple Seeds to scale your setup beyond a single Seed, please check out the Enterprise Edition as that feature is only available there.

Set Up Kubernetes

To aid in setting up the Seed and Master Clusters, we provide KubeOne, which can be used to set up a highly-available Kubernetes cluster. Refer to the KubeOne documentation for details on how to use it.

Please take note of the recommended hardware and networking requirements before provisioning a cluster. Resource requirements on Seed Clusters or combined Master/Seed Clusters grow with each created User Cluster. As such, it is advised to plan ahead and provision enough capacity to host the anticipated number of User Clusters. If you are using KubeOne, configuring the cluster-autoscaler addon might be a good idea to provide enough resources while the number of User Clusters grows.

Installation

Make sure you have a kubeconfig for the desired Master Cluster available. It needs to have cluster-admin permissions on that cluster to install all KKP master components.

The installer will use the KUBECONFIG environment variable to pick up the right kubeconfig to access the designated Master Cluster. Ensure that you have exported it, for example like this (on Linux and macOS):

export KUBECONFIG=/path/to/master/kubeconfig

Download the Installer

Download the release archive from our GitHub release page (e.g. kubermatic-ce-X.Y-linux-amd64.tar.gz) containing the Kubermatic Installer and the required Helm charts for your operating system and extract it locally. Note that for Windows zip files are provided instead of tar.gz files.

# For latest version:
VERSION=$(curl -w '%{url_effective}' -I -L -s -S https://github.com/kubermatic/kubermatic/releases/latest -o /dev/null | sed -e 's|.*/v||')
# For specific version set it explicitly:
# VERSION=2.25.x
wget https://github.com/kubermatic/kubermatic/releases/download/v${VERSION}/kubermatic-ce-v${VERSION}-linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar -xzvf kubermatic-ce-v${VERSION}-linux-amd64.tar.gz

# Determine your macOS processor architecture type
# Replace 'amd64' with 'arm64' if using an Apple Silicon (M1) Mac.
export ARCH=amd64
# For latest version:
VERSION=$(curl -w '%{url_effective}' -I -L -s -S https://github.com/kubermatic/kubermatic/releases/latest -o /dev/null | sed -e 's|.*/v||')
# For specific version set it explicitly:
# VERSION=2.25.x
wget "https://github.com/kubermatic/kubermatic/releases/download/v${VERSION}/kubermatic-ce-v${VERSION}-darwin-${ARCH}.tar.gz"
tar -xzvf "kubermatic-ce-v${VERSION}-darwin-${ARCH}.tar.gz"

Prepare Configuration

The installation and configuration for a KKP system consists of two important files:

• A values.yaml used to configure the various Helm charts KKP ships with. This is where nginx, Prometheus, Dex, etc. can be adjusted to the target environment. A single values.yaml is used to configure all Helm charts combined.
• A kubermatic.yaml that configures KKP itself and is an instance of the KubermaticConfiguration CRD. This configuration will be stored in the cluster and serves as the basis for the Kubermatic Operator to manage the actual KKP installation.

The release archive hosted on GitHub contains examples for both of the configuration files (values.example.yaml and kubermatic.example.yaml). It’s a good idea to take them as a starting point and add more options as necessary.

The key items to consider while preparing your configuration files are described in the table below.

There are many more options, but these are essential to get a minimal system up and running. A full reference of all options can be found in the KubermaticConfiguration Reference. The secret keys mentioned above can be generated using any password generator or on the shell using cat /dev/urandom | base64 | tr -dc 'A-Za-z0-9' | head -c32. Alternatively, the Kubermatic Installer will suggest some properly generated secrets for you when it notices that some are missing, for example:

./kubermatic-installer deploy --config kubermatic.yaml --helm-values values.yaml

Output will be similar to this:

INFO[15:15:20] 🛫 Initializing installer…                     edition="Community Edition" version=v2.21.2
INFO[15:15:20] 🚦 Validating the provided configuration…
ERROR[15:15:20]    The provided configuration files are invalid:
ERROR[15:15:20]    KubermaticConfiguration: spec.auth.serviceAccountKey must be a non-empty secret, for example: ZPCs7_KzgJxUSA5lCk_oNzL7RQFTQ6cOnHuTLAh4pGw
ERROR[15:15:20]    Operation failed: please review your configuration and try again.

Without LoadBalancers

If the Master Cluster’s cloud provider does not support Services of type LoadBalancer (e.g. in an on-premise environment) you can configure KKP to not create such Services. Later parts of the documentation will cover this case while setting up DNS as well.

To prepare your configuration correctly for this case, ensure that nginx-ingress-controller will be set up with a Service of type NodePort instead of LoadBalancer. This can be done by providing the appropriate configuration in your values.yaml file (this will bind access to Ingress resources exposed via plain HTTP to port 32080 and encrypted HTTPS to port 32443 on all nodes):

# this is a snippet, not a full values.yaml!
nginx:
  controller:
    service:
      type: NodePort
      nodePorts:
        http: 32080
        https: 32443

Make sure to include 32443 as port in all URLs both in kubermatic.yaml and values.yaml, e.g. the token issuer URL from kubermatic.yaml should now be https://kkp.example.com:32443/dex.

Create a StorageClass

KKP uses a custom storage class for the volumes created for User Clusters. This class, kubermatic-fast, needs to be created before the installation can succeed and is required to use SSDs or a comparable storage layer. The etcd clusters for every User Cluster will store their data in this StorageClass and etcd is highly sensitive to slow disk I/O.

The installer can automatically create an SSD-based StorageClass for a subset of cloud providers. It can also simply copy the default StorageClass, but this is not recommended for production setups unless the default class is using SSDs.

apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: kubermatic-fast
provisioner: csi.vsphere.vmware.com

kubectl apply -f ./storageclass.yaml

# snippet, this is not a valid StorageClass!
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: kubermatic-fast
provisioner: csi.example.com
# CSI driver specific parameters
parameters:
  parameter1: value1
  parameter2: value2

kubectl apply -f ./storageclass.yaml

Run Installer

Once the configuration files have been prepared, it’s time to run the installer, which will validate them and then install all the required components into the cluster. Open a terminal window and run the installer like so:

./kubermatic-installer deploy \
  # uncomment the line below after updating it to your respective provider; remove flag if provider is not supported (see above)
  # --storageclass aws \
  --config kubermatic.yaml \
  --helm-values values.yaml

Once the installer has finished, the KKP Master Cluster has been installed and will be ready to use once the necessary cert-manager configuration and DNS records have been configured (see the next steps).

If you change your mind later on and adjust configuration options, it’s safe to just run the installer again to apply your changes.

Update DNS & TLS

By default, KKP uses cert-manager to generate TLS certificates for the platform.

Configure ClusterIssuers

If you didn’t decide to change the settings (.spec.ingress.certificateIssuer.name in kubermatic.yaml), you need to create a ClusterIssuer object, named letsencrypt-prod to enable cert-manager to issue the certificates. An example of this file can be found below. If you adjusted this configuration option while preparing the configuration files, make sure to change the ClusterIssuer resource name accordingly.

For other possible options, please refer to the external documentation.

apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
kind: ClusterIssuer
metadata:
  name: letsencrypt-prod
spec:
  acme:
    email: <INSERT_YOUR_EMAIL_HERE>
    server: https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
    privateKeySecretRef:
      name: letsencrypt-prod-acme-account-key
    solvers:
    - http01:
       ingress:
         class: nginx

Save this (or the adjusted ClusterIssuer you are going to use) to a file (e.g. clusterissuer.yaml) and apply it to your cluster:

kubectl apply -f ./clusterissuer.yaml

Create DNS Records

In order to acquire a valid certificate, a DNS name needs to point to your cluster. Depending on your environment this can mean a LoadBalancer service or a NodePort service. The nginx-ingress-controller Helm chart will by default create a load balancer, unless you reconfigured it because your environment does not support load balancers.

The installer will do its best to inform you about the required DNS records to set up. You will receive an output similar to this:

INFO[13:03:33]    📝 Applying Kubermatic Configuration…
INFO[13:03:33]    ✅ Success.
INFO[13:03:33]    📡 Determining DNS settings…
INFO[13:03:33]       The main LoadBalancer is ready.
INFO[13:03:33]
INFO[13:03:33]         Service             : nginx-ingress-controller / nginx-ingress-controller
INFO[13:03:33]         Ingress via hostname: EXAMPLEEXAMPLEEXAMPLEEXAMPLE-EXAMPLE.eu-central-1.elb.amazonaws.com
INFO[13:03:33]
INFO[13:03:33]       Please ensure your DNS settings for "kkp.example.com" include the following records:
INFO[13:03:33]
INFO[13:03:33]          kkp.example.com.    IN  CNAME  EXAMPLEEXAMPLEEXAMPLEEXAMPLE-EXAMPLE.eu-central-1.elb.amazonaws.com.
INFO[13:03:33]          *.kkp.example.com.  IN  CNAME  EXAMPLEEXAMPLEEXAMPLEEXAMPLE-EXAMPLE.eu-central-1.elb.amazonaws.com.
INFO[13:03:33]
INFO[13:03:33] 🛬 Installation completed successfully. ✌

Follow the instructions on screen to setup your DNS. If the installer for whatever reason is unable to determine the appropriate DNS settings, it will tell you so and you can manually collect the required information from the cluster. See the following sections for more information regarding the required DNS records.

With LoadBalancers

If your cloud provider supports load balancers, you can find the target IP / hostname by looking at the nginx-ingress-controller Service:

kubectl -n nginx-ingress-controller get services

Output will be similar to this:

#NAME                       TYPE           CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP    PORT(S)                      AGE
#nginx-ingress-controller   LoadBalancer   10.47.248.232   1.2.3.4        80:32014/TCP,443:30772/TCP   449d

EXTERNAL-IP is what you need to put into the DNS record. Note that this can be a hostname (for example on AWS, this can be my-loadbalancer-1234567890.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com) and in this case, the DNS record needs to be a CNAME rather than an A record.

Without LoadBalancers

If you have set up KKP to work without LoadBalancer support, set up the DNS records to point to one or many of your cluster nodes. You can get a list of external IPs like this:

kubectl get nodes -o wide

Output will be similar to this:

#NAME                        STATUS   ROLES    AGE     VERSION     INTERNAL-IP   EXTERNAL-IP
#worker-node-cbd686cd-50nx   Ready    <none>   3h36m   v1.22.8     10.156.0.36   1.2.3.4
#worker-node-cbd686cd-59s2   Ready    <none>   21m     v1.22.8     10.156.0.14   1.2.3.5
#worker-node-cbd686cd-90j3   Ready    <none>   45m     v1.22.8     10.156.0.22   1.2.3.6

For this example you could choose the second node and therefore, 1.2.3.5 is your DNS record target.

DNS Records

The main DNS record must connect the kkp.example.com domain with the target IP / hostname. Depending on whether or not your load balancer or node uses hostnames instead of IPs (like AWS ELB), create either an A or a CNAME record, respectively.

kkp.example.com.   IN   A   1.2.3.4
; or for a CNAME:
kkp.example.com.   IN   CNAME   myloadbalancer.example.com.

Identity Aware Proxy

It’s a common step to later setup an identity-aware proxy (IAP) to securely access other KKP components from the logging or monitoring stacks. This involves setting up either individual DNS records per IAP deployment (one for Prometheus, one for Grafana, etc.) or simply creating a single wildcard record: *.kkp.example.com.

Whatever you choose, the DNS record needs to point to the same endpoint (IP or hostname, meaning A or CNAME records respectively) as the previous record, i.e. 1.2.3.4. This is because the one nginx-ingress-controller is routing traffic both for KKP and all other services.

*.kkp.example.com.   IN   A       1.2.3.4
; or for a CNAME:
*.kkp.example.com.   IN   CNAME   myloadbalancer.example.com.

If wildcard records are not possible, you can configure individual records instead:

prometheus.kkp.example.com.     IN   A       1.2.3.4
alertmanager.kkp.example.com.   IN   A       1.2.3.4

Validation

With the two DNS records configured, it’s now time to wait for the certificate to be acquired. You can watch the progress by doing watch kubectl -n kubermatic get certificates until it shows READY=True:

watch kubectl -n kubermatic get certificates

Output will be similar to this:

#NAME         READY   SECRET           AGE
#kubermatic   True    kubermatic-tls   1h

If the certificate does not become ready, kubectl describe it and follow the chain from Certificate to Order to Challenges. Typical faults include:

• Bad DNS records.
• A misconfigured KubermaticConfiguration pointing to a different domain.

All pods running inside the kubermatic namespace should now be running. If they are not, check their logs to find out what’s broken.

First Sign In

With all this in place, you should be able to access https://kkp.example.com/ (i.e. the URL to your KKP setup that you configured) and log in either with your static password from the values.yaml files or using any of your chosen connectors. This will initiate your first contact with the KKP API which will create an initial User resource for your account.

This will allow you to use the KKP Dashboard and API as an admin. Other users can be promoted to admins using the Admin Panel.

Next Steps

• Add a Seed cluster to start creating User Clusters.
• Install the Master / Seed Monitoring, Logging & Alerting Stack to collect cluster-wide metrics in a central place.