Install DKP on a small environment

You can install Kommander on a small environment with smaller memory, storage, and CPU requirements for testing and demo purposes. This topic describes methods for installing Kommander in these environments. Refer to the Kommander documentation for more information.

Enterprise considerations: D2iQ recommends performing testing and demo tasks in a single-cluster environment. The Enterprise license is designed for multi-cluster environments and fleet management, which require a minimum amount of resources. Applying an Enterprise license key to the previous installation adds modifications to your environment that can exhaust a small environment’s resources.

Prerequisites

Ensure you have done the following:

You have acquired a DKP license.
You have installed Konvoy.
You have reviewed the prerequisite section pertaining to your air-gapped, or networked environment.

Minimal Kommander installation

The YAML file that is used to install a minimal configuration of Kommander contains the bare minimum setup that allows you to deploy applications, and access the DKP UI. It does NOT include applications for cost monitoring, logging, alerting, object storage, etc.

In this YAML file you can find the lines that correspond to all platform applications which would be included in a normal Kommander setup. Applications that have enabled set to false are not taken into account during installation. If you want to test an additional application, you can enable it individually to be installed by setting enabled to true on the corresponding line in the YAML file.

For example, if you want to enable the logging stack, set enabled to true for grafana-logging, grafana-loki, logging-operator and minio-operator. Note that depending on the size of your cluster, enabling several platform applications could exhaust your cluster’s resources.

Some applications depend on other applications to work properly. Refer to the dependencies documentation to find out which other applications you need to enable to test the target application.

Initialize your Kommander installation and name it kommander_minimal.yaml:

CODE

dkp install kommander --init --kubeconfig=<cluster-kubeconfig>.conf -oyaml > kommander_minimal.yaml

Edit your kommander_minimal.yaml to match the following example:

CODE

apiVersion: config.kommander.mesosphere.io/v1alpha1
kind: Installation
apps:
  dex:
    enabled: true
  dex-k8s-authenticator:
    enabled: true
  dkp-insights-management:
    enabled: false
  fluent-bit:
    enabled: true
  gatekeeper:
    enabled: true
  gitea:
    enabled: true
  grafana-logging:
    enabled: false
  grafana-loki:
    enabled: false
  kommander:
    enabled: true
  kube-prometheus-stack:
    enabled: false
  kubefed:
    enabled: true
  kubernetes-dashboard:
    enabled: false
  kubetunnel:
    enabled: false
  logging-operator:
    enabled: false
  minio-operator:
    enabled: false
  prometheus-adapter:
    enabled: false
  reloader:
    enabled: true
  traefik:
    enabled: true
  traefik-forward-auth-mgmt:
    enabled: true
  velero:
    enabled: false
ageEncryptionSecretName: sops-age
clusterHostname: ""

Install Kommander on your cluster with the following command:

CODE

dkp install kommander --installer-config ./kommander_minimal.yaml --kubeconfig=<cluster-kubeconfig>.conf

After running the install command above, HelmReleases begin to appear on the cluster.

CODE

kubectl -n kommander wait --for condition=Released helmreleases --all --timeout 15m

This will wait for each of the helm charts to reach their Released condition, eventually resulting in something resembling this:

CODE

helmrelease.helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/cluster-observer-1234567890 condition met
helmrelease.helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/dex condition met
helmrelease.helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/dex-k8s-authenticator condition met
helmrelease.helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/gitea condition met
helmrelease.helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/karma-traefik-certs condition met
helmrelease.helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/kommander condition met
helmrelease.helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/kommander-appmanagement condition met
helmrelease.helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/kube-oidc-proxy condition met
helmrelease.helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/kubecost-traefik-certs condition met
helmrelease.helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/kubefed condition met
helmrelease.helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/prometheus-traefik-certs condition met
helmrelease.helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/reloader condition met
helmrelease.helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/traefik condition met
helmrelease.helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/traefik-forward-auth-mgmt condition met

An alternative to using the --kubeconfig=<cluster-config> flag is to initialize the KUBECONFIG environment variable. You can do this by running export KUBECONFIG=<cluster-config>. Setting your KUBECONFIG (either by flag or by environment variable) ensures that Kommander is installed on the workload cluster.

When completed, you can verify your installation. For more on exploring your cluster, view the install Kommander topic.