Quick start

Charmed Kubernetes® delivers a 'pure K8s' experience, tested across a wide range of clouds and integrated with modern metrics and monitoring. It works across all major public clouds and private infrastructure, enabling your teams to operate Kubernetes clusters on demand, anywhere.

With this quick start guide and some tools from Canonical, you'll have a Kubernetes cluster running on the cloud of your choice in minutes!

What you'll need

Note:

If you don't meet these requirements, there are additional ways of installing Charmed Kubernetes®, including additional OS support and an entirely local deploy. Please see the more general Installing Charmed Kubernetes page for details.

  1. 1Install Juju

    Juju is a tool for deploying, configuring, and operating complex software on public or private clouds. It can be installed with a snap: 
    sudo snap install juju --channel=3.1/stable

  2. 2Find your cloud

    Juju has baked in knowledge of many public clouds such as AWS, Azure and Google. You can see which ones are ready to use by running this command: 
    juju clouds

    Find out more about Clouds in Juju

  3. 3Add Credentials

    Most clouds require credentials so that the cloud knows which operations are authorised, so you will need to supply these for Juju. If you choose to use AWS, for example, you would run:

    juju add-credential aws

    For a different cloud, just substitute in the name from the previous list output by Juju. The data you need to supply will vary depending on the cloud.

  4. 4Add a Controller

    The Juju controller is used to manage the software deployed through Juju, from deployment to upgrades to day-two operations. One Juju controller can manage multiple projects or workspaces, which in Juju are known as 'models'.

    juju bootstrap aws my-controller

  5. 5Add a Model

    The model holds a specific deployment. It is a good idea to create a new one specifically for each deployment.

    juju add-model k8s

    Remember that you can have multiple models on each controller, so you can deploy multiple Kubernetes clusters, or other applications.

  6. 6Deploy Kubernetes

    Deploy the Kubernetes bundle to the model. This will add instances to the model and deploy the required applications.

    juju deploy charmed-kubernetes

  7. 6Monitor the deployment

    Juju is now busy creating instances, installing software and connecting the different parts of the cluster together, which can take several minutes. You can monitor what's going on by running:

    watch -c juju status --color

  8. 6Start using your cluster!

    Congratulations! You have a Kubernetes cluster up and running - now let's use it! The link below takes you to the operations guide, detailing some of the common things you'll want to do next:

    Get started with your new cluster ›

Note:

This guide gets you up and running with Charmed Kubernetes quickly. If you want to explore how to customise your install, please see the Installing Charmed Kubernetes page for a more detailed guide.

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