☰
Navigation :

Community

Once you have Gloo Mesh installed, the next step is to register Kubernetes clusters that will have service meshes you want to manage. The registration process creates a service account, cluster-role, and cluster-role association on the target cluster granting the service account the necessary permissions to monitor and make changes to the cluster. The current cluster-role definition is documented in the references section of the documentation.

This guide will walk you through the basics of registering clusters using the meshctl tool. We will be using the two cluster contexts mentioned in the Gloo Mesh installation guide, kind-mgmt-cluster and kind-remote-cluster. Your cluster context names will likely differ, so please substitute the proper values.

Register A Cluster

In order to identify a cluster as being managed by Gloo Mesh, we have to register it in our installation. Registration ensures we are aware of the cluster, and we have proper credentials to communicate with the Kubernetes API server in that cluster.

Remote Cluster

We will start by registering a remote cluster, i.e. a cluster not running the Gloo Mesh installation. We will need to tell meshctl which kubectl context to use. Let's start by storing the name of our context in a variable:

REMOTE_CONTEXT=your_remote_context

We will register the cluster with the meshctl cluster register community command. We will assume that the management plane cluster (i.e. where discovery and networking are running) is your current kubeconfig context. If not, set the --mgmt-context flag. The kubeconfig context for the cluster we want to register to the management plane is specified with the --remote-context flag. If you are using Kind for your clusters, you will need to specify the --api-server-address flag along with the IP address and port of the Kubernetes API server. Select the Kind tab for the commands.


meshctl cluster register community remote-cluster \
  --remote-context $REMOTE_CONTEXT


ADDRESS=$(docker inspect remote-cluster-control-plane | jq -r '.[0].NetworkSettings.Networks.kind.IPAddress')

meshctl cluster register community remote-cluster \
  --remote-context $REMOTE_CONTEXT \
  --api-server-address ${ADDRESS}:6443


ADDRESS=$(docker exec "remote-cluster-control-plane" ip addr show dev eth0 | sed -nE 's|\s*inet\s+([0-9.]+).*|\1|p')

meshctl cluster register community remote-cluster \
  --remote-context $REMOTE_CONTEXT \
  --api-server-address ${ADDRESS}:6443

successfully registered cluster remote-cluster

The context we use must have adequate permissions on the target cluster to create the service account, cluster-role, and cluster-role assignment.

You can validate the registration by looking at the Custom Resource created in the management cluster:

kubectl get kubernetescluster -n gloo-mesh remote-cluster

NAME             AGE
remote-cluster   10m

The target cluster will also have the following elements created:

kubectl get sa --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT -n gloo-mesh

NAME             SECRETS   AGE
cert-agent       1         11m
default          1         11m
remote-cluster   1         11

kubectl get clusterrole --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT gloomesh-remote-access

NAME                     AGE
gloomesh-remote-access   12m

kubectl get clusterrolebinding --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT \
  remote-cluster-gloomesh-remote-access-clusterrole-binding

NAME                                                        AGE
remote-cluster-gloomesh-remote-access-clusterrole-binding   13m

Register the management cluster

First, let's store the name of the management cluster context in a variable:

MGMT_CONTEXT=your_management_plane_context

Select the Kind tab if you are running Kubernetes in Docker.


meshctl cluster register community mgmt-cluster \
  --remote-context $MGMT_CONTEXT


ADDRESS=$(docker inspect mgmt-cluster-control-plane | jq -r '.[0].NetworkSettings.Networks.kind.IPAddress')

meshctl cluster register community mgmt-cluster \
  --remote-context $MGMT_CONTEXT \
  --api-server-address ${ADDRESS}:6443


ADDRESS=$(docker exec "mgmt-cluster-control-plane" ip addr show dev eth0 | sed -nE 's|\s*inet\s+([0-9.]+).*|\1|p')

meshctl cluster register community mgmt-cluster \
  --remote-context $MGMT_CONTEXT \
  --api-server-address ${ADDRESS}:6443

successfully registered cluster mgmt-cluster

What happened?

To go into slightly more detail about what just happened:

Next Steps

And we're done! Any meshes in that cluster will be discovered and available for configuration by Gloo Mesh. See the guide on installing Istio, to see how to easily get Istio running on that cluster.