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Using Kind for Gloo Mesh Setup

The installation of Gloo Mesh assumes that you have access to at least one Kubernetes cluster, and preferably two for following the multi-cluster guides. If you do not have access to remote clusters, you can instead spin up two local clusters using Kubernetes in Docker (Kind). Be aware that this will use a significant amount of RAM when both clusters are running with Istio and Gloo Mesh installed. We recommend a workstation with a minimum of 16GB.

This guide will walk you through deploying two Kind clusters referred to as the mgmt-cluster and remote-cluster. The mgmt-cluster will host the Gloo Mesh installation as well as a deployment of Istio. The remote-cluster will run Istio only, and will be used in later guides to demonstrate the multi-cluster management capabilities of Gloo Mesh.

Using Kind

Before you run Kind on your local workstation, you will need the following pre-requisites:

Docker Desktop or Docker running as a service
Kind installed using go get or a stable binary for your platform

Once you have those pieces in place, you will simply run the following commands to create the mgmt-cluster and remote-cluster clusters.

# Create the mgmt-cluster
#Set version, cluster name, and port
kindImage=kindest/node:v1.17.5
cluster=mgmt-cluster
port=32001

cat <<EOF | kind create cluster --name "${cluster}" --image $kindImage --config=-
kind: Cluster
apiVersion: kind.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4
nodes:
- role: control-plane
  extraPortMappings:
  - containerPort: ${port}
    hostPort: ${port}
    protocol: TCP
  kubeadmConfigPatches:
  - |
    kind: InitConfiguration
    nodeRegistration:
      kubeletExtraArgs:
        # Populate nodes with region/zone info, which are used by VirtualDestination locality-based failover (Enterprise-only)
        node-labels: "ingress-ready=true,topology.kubernetes.io/region=us-east-1,topology.kubernetes.io/zone=us-east-1b"
kubeadmConfigPatches:
- |
  kind: InitConfiguration
  nodeRegistration:
    kubeletExtraArgs:
      authorization-mode: "AlwaysAllow"
EOF

# Create the remote cluster
cluster=remote-cluster
port=32000

cat <<EOF | kind create cluster --name "${cluster}" --image $kindImage --config=-
kind: Cluster
apiVersion: kind.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4
nodes:
- role: control-plane
  extraPortMappings:
  - containerPort: ${port}
    hostPort: ${port}
    protocol: TCP
  kubeadmConfigPatches:
  - |
    kind: InitConfiguration
    nodeRegistration:
      kubeletExtraArgs:
        # Populate nodes with region/zone info, which are used by VirtualDestination locality-based failover (Enterprise-only)
        node-labels: "ingress-ready=true,topology.kubernetes.io/region=us-east-1,topology.kubernetes.io/zone=us-east-1c"
kubeadmConfigPatches:
- |
  kind: InitConfiguration
  nodeRegistration:
    kubeletExtraArgs:
      authorization-mode: "AlwaysAllow"
EOF

#Switch to the mgmt-cluster context
kubectl config use-context kind-mgmt-cluster

Next Steps

Now that you have two Kind clusters available, you are ready to proceed with the installation of Gloo Mesh or Gloo Mesh Enterprise.