Create a New GCP Cluster

Prerequisites

• Before you begin, ensure you create a Bootstrap cluster.

Name your Cluster

1. Give your cluster a unique name suitable for your environment.

   In GCP it is critical that the name is unique, as no two clusters in the same GCP account can have the same name.

2. Set the environment variable:

   CODE

   export CLUSTER_NAME=gcp-example

The cluster name may only contain the following characters: a-z, 0-9, ., and -. Cluster creation will fail if the name has capital letters. See Kubernetes for more naming information.

To increase Docker Hub's rate limit use your Docker Hub credentials when creating the cluster, by setting the following flag --registry-mirror-url=https://registry-1.docker.io --registry-mirror-username=<username> --registry-mirror-password=<password> on the dkp create cluster command.

Create a New GCP Cluster

Availability zones (AZs) are isolated locations within data center regions from which public cloud services originate and operate. Because all the nodes in a node pool are deployed in a single Availability Zone, you may wish to create additional node pools is to ensure your cluster has nodes deployed in multiple Availability Zones.

By default, the control-plane Nodes will be created in 3 different zones. However, the default worker Nodes will reside in a single zone. You may create additional node pools in other zones with the dkp create nodepool command. The default region for the availability zones is us-west1.

1. Create an image using Konvoy Image Builder (KIB) and then export the image name:

   BASH

   export IMAGE_NAME=projects/${GCP_PROJECT}/global/images/<image_name_from_kib>

2. (Optional) You can modify the Control Plane Audit logs settings using the information contained in the page Configuring the Control Plane.

3. (Optional) Determine what VPC Network to use. All GCP accounts come with a preconfigured VPC Network named default, which will be used if you do not specify a different network.
   To use a different VPC network for your cluster, create one by following these instructions for Create and Manage VPC Networks. Then specify the --network <new_vpc_network_name> option on the create cluster command below. Follow the link for more information on GCP Cloud Nat and network flag.

4. Create a Kubernetes cluster. During create a new cluster command, the user can add flags.  One important flag is --network.  If the default network is not cloud nat and you would like it to be, then the --network flag needs to be set to true.  This would enable a hidden or non-public IP address:

   BASH

   dkp create cluster gcp \
   --cluster-name=${CLUSTER_NAME} \
   --additional-tags=owner=$(whoami) \
   --project=${GCP_PROJECT} \
   --image=${IMAGE_NAME}

5. Wait for the cluster control-plane to be ready:

   BASH

   kubectl wait --for=condition=ControlPlaneReady "clusters/${CLUSTER_NAME}" --timeout=20m

6. After the objects are created on the API server, the Cluster API controllers reconcile them. They create infrastructure and machines. As they progress, they update the Status of each object. Konvoy provides a command to describe the current status of the cluster:

   BASH

   dkp describe cluster -c ${CLUSTER_NAME}

   CODE

   NAME                                                                      READY  SEVERITY  REASON  SINCE  MESSAGE
   Cluster/gcp-example                                                       True                     52s
   ├─ClusterInfrastructure - GCPCluster/gcp-example
   ├─ControlPlane - KubeadmControlPlane/gcp-example-control-plane            True                     52s
   │ ├─Machine/gcp-example-control-plane-6fbzn                               True                     2m32s
   │ │ └─MachineInfrastructure - GCPMachine/gcp-example-control-plane-62g6s
   │ ├─Machine/gcp-example-control-plane-jf6s2                               True                     7m36s
   │ │ └─MachineInfrastructure - GCPMachine/gcp-example-control-plane-bsr2z
   │ └─Machine/gcp-example-control-plane-mnbfs                               True                     54s
   │   └─MachineInfrastructure - GCPMachine/gcp-example-control-plane-s8xsx
   └─Workers
     └─MachineDeployment/gcp-example-md-0                                    True                     78s
       ├─Machine/gcp-example-md-0-68b86fddb8-8glsw                           True                     2m49s
       │ └─MachineInfrastructure - GCPMachine/gcp-example-md-0-zls8d
       ├─Machine/gcp-example-md-0-68b86fddb8-bvbm7                           True                     2m48s
       │ └─MachineInfrastructure - GCPMachine/gcp-example-md-0-5zcvc
       ├─Machine/gcp-example-md-0-68b86fddb8-k9499                           True                     2m49s
       │ └─MachineInfrastructure - GCPMachine/gcp-example-md-0-k8h5p
       └─Machine/gcp-example-md-0-68b86fddb8-l6vfb                           True                     2m49s
         └─MachineInfrastructure - GCPMachine/gcp-example-md-0-9h5vn

Once the cluster creation process completes, move on to exploring your new cluster.