Automated build of HA k3s Cluster with kube-vip and MetalLB

This playbook will build an HA Kubernetes cluster with k3s, kube-vip and MetalLB via ansible.

This is based on the work from this fork which is based on the work from k3s-io/k3s-ansible. It uses kube-vip to create a load balancer for control plane, and metal-lb for its service LoadBalancer.

If you want more context on how this works, see:

📄 Documentation (including example commands)

📺 Watch the Video

📖 k3s Ansible Playbook

Build a Kubernetes cluster using Ansible with k3s. The goal is easily install a HA Kubernetes cluster on machines running:

• Debian (tested on version 11)
• Ubuntu (tested on version 22.04)
• Rocky (tested on version 9)

on processor architecture:

• x64
• arm64
• armhf

✅ System requirements

• Control Node (the machine you are running ansible commands) must have Ansible 2.11+ If you need a quick primer on Ansible you can check out my docs and setting up Ansible.

• You will also need to install collections that this playbook uses by running ansible-galaxy collection install -r ./collections/requirements.yml (important❗)

• netaddr package must be available to Ansible. If you have installed Ansible via apt, this is already taken care of. If you have installed Ansible via pip, make sure to install netaddr into the respective virtual environment.

• server and agent nodes should have passwordless SSH access, if not you can supply arguments to provide credentials --ask-pass --ask-become-pass to each command.

🚀 Getting Started

🍴 Preparation

First create a new directory based on the sample directory within the inventory directory:

cp -R inventory/sample inventory/my-cluster

Second, edit inventory/my-cluster/hosts.ini to match the system information gathered above

For example:

[master]
192.168.30.38
192.168.30.39
192.168.30.40

[node]
192.168.30.41
192.168.30.42

[k3s_cluster:children]
master
node

If multiple hosts are in the master group, the playbook will automatically set up k3s in HA mode with etcd.

Finally, copy ansible.example.cfg to ansible.cfg and adapt the inventory path to match the files that you just created.

This requires at least k3s version 1.19.1 however the version is configurable by using the k3s_version variable.

If needed, you can also edit inventory/my-cluster/group_vars/all.yml to match your environment.

☸️ Create Cluster

Start provisioning of the cluster using the following command:

ansible-playbook site.yml -i inventory/my-cluster/hosts.ini

After deployment control plane will be accessible via virtual ip-address which is defined in inventory/group_vars/all.yml as apiserver_endpoint

🔥 Remove k3s cluster

ansible-playbook reset.yml -i inventory/my-cluster/hosts.ini

You should also reboot these nodes due to the VIP not being destroyed

⚙️ Kube Config

To copy your kube config locally so that you can access your Kubernetes cluster run:

scp debian@master_ip:/etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml ~/.kube/config

If you get file Permission denied, go into the node and temporarly run:

sudo chmod 777 /etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml

Then copy with the scp command and reset the permissions back to:

sudo chmod 600 /etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml

You'll then want to modify the config to point to master IP by running:

sudo nano ~/.kube/config

Then change server: https://127.0.0.1:6443 to match your master IP: server: https://192.168.1.222:6443

🔨 Testing your cluster

See the commands here.

Troubleshooting

Be sure to see this post on how to troubleshoot common problems

Testing the playbook using molecule

This playbook includes a molecule-based test setup. It is run automatically in CI, but you can also run the tests locally. This might be helpful for quick feedback in a few cases. You can find more information about it here.

Pre-commit Hooks

This repo uses pre-commit and pre-commit-hooks to lint and fix common style and syntax errors. Be sure to install python packages and then run pre-commit install. For more information, see pre-commit

🌌 Ansible Galaxy

This collection can now be used in larger ansible projects.

Instructions:

• create or modify a file collections/requirements.yml in your project

collections:
  - name: ansible.utils
  - name: community.general
  - name: ansible.posix
  - name: kubernetes.core
  - name: https://github.com/techno-tim/k3s-ansible.git
    type: git
    version: master

• install via ansible-galaxy collection install -r ./collections/requirements.yml
• every role is now available via the prefix techno_tim.k3s_ansible. e.g. techno_tim.k3s_ansible.lxc

Thanks 🤝

This repo is really standing on the shoulders of giants. Thank you to all those who have contributed and thanks to these repos for code and ideas:

• k3s-io/k3s-ansible
• geerlingguy/turing-pi-cluster
• 212850a/k3s-ansible