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Martin Mwangi
Martin Mwangi

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Infrastructure GitOps: A Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up Your Test Cluster Locally using minikube for Seamless Exploration

#crossplane #gitops #aws #devops

Introduction

Explore the power of Crossplane Infrastructure through GitOps as I guide you in setting up a Crossplane Management Cluster on a local Minikube cluster. Follow this comprehensive tutorial to create and manage AWS resources seamlessly within your Kubernetes environment.

Prerequisites for setting up Crossplane

  • A Kubernetes cluster with at least 2 GB of RAM

  • Permissions to create pods and secrets in the Kubernetes cluster

  • Helm version v3.2.0 or later

  • An AWS account with permissions to create an S3 storage bucket

  • AWS access keys

Step 1: A Kubernetes cluster with at least 2 GB of RAM 
We will use Minikube to set up a Kubernetes cluster locally on Ubuntu - x86-64. If your setup is different, visit https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/ to download the binary.

Install the latest minikube stable release:

curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64
sudo install minikube-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/minikube
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Start minikube:

minikube start
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Add the current user to the docker group and then start a new shell with the updated group membership using the command below

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER && newgrp docker
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If minikube fails to start, setup docker as your driver using the commands below:

Start a cluster using the docker driver:

minikube start --driver=docker
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To make docker the default driver

minikube config set driver docker
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Interact with the cluster:
If you already have kubectl installed to get pods

kubectl get po -A
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If you don’t have kubectl installed, use the command below to set it up and get pods:

minikube kubectl -- get po -A
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Step 2: Install Helm
Use the commands below to install helm locally using a bash script:

curl -fsSL -o get_helm.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/main/scripts/get-helm-3
chmod 700 get_helm.sh
./get_helm.sh
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Step 3: Install Crossplane
Add the Crossplane Helm repository:

helm repo add crossplane-stable https://charts.crossplane.io/stable
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Update the local Helm chart cache:

helm repo update
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Install the Crossplane helm chart:

helm install crossplane \
--namespace crossplane-system \
--create-namespace crossplane-stable/crossplane
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Run the Helm dry-run to see all the Crossplane components Helm installs.

helm install crossplane \
crossplane-stable/crossplane \
--dry-run --debug \
--namespace crossplane-system \
--create-namespace
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Install the Crossplane components:

helm install crossplane \
crossplane-stable/crossplane \
--namespace crossplane-system \
--create-namespace
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Verify if Crossplane is installed:

kubectl get pods -n crossplane-system
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View all the end-points created when Crossplane is installed:

kubectl api-resources | grep crossplane
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Install the AWS provider
Install the AWS provider into the Kubernetes cluster with a Kubernetes configuration file. You can choose your provider based on the managed resource you want o provision. We will install AWS S3 provider which provisions S3 managed resource

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: pkg.crossplane.io/v1
kind: Provider
metadata:
  name: provider-aws-s3
spec:
  package: xpkg.upbound.io/upbound/provider-aws-s3:v0.37.0
EOF
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Verify the provider installed with kubectl get providers.

kubectl get providers
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Add your access key and secret to a text file aws-credentials.txt

[default]
aws_access_key_id = <access key>
aws_secret_access_key = <secret key>
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Create a Kubernetes secret with the AWS credentials

kubectl create secret \
generic aws-secret \
-n crossplane-system \
--from-file=creds=./aws-credentials.txt
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View kubernetes secret

kubectl describe secret aws-secret -n crossplane-system
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Create a ProviderConfig: a ProviderConfig customizes the settings of the AWS Provider. Apply the ProviderConfig with this Kubernetes configuration file:

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: aws.upbound.io/v1beta1
kind: ProviderConfig
metadata:
  name: default
spec:
  credentials:
    source: Secret
    secretRef:
      namespace: crossplane-system
      name: aws-secret
      key: creds
EOF
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Create a managed resource:

bucket=$(echo "crossplane-bucket-"$(head -n 4096 /dev/urandom | openssl sha1 | tail -c 10))
cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: s3.aws.upbound.io/v1beta1
kind: Bucket
metadata:
  name: $bucket
spec:
  forProvider:
    region: us-east-2
  providerConfigRef:
    name: default
EOF
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A managed resource is anything Crossplane creates and manages outside of the Kubernetes cluster.
Verify crossplane has created an S3 bucket:

kubectl get buckets
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References

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