Kubernetes Gardener

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This page was last updated June 28, 2019.

Bootstrapping Gardener

To set up your own Gardener, see the documentation or have a look at the landscape-setup-template project. To learn more about this open source project, read the blog on kubernetes.io.

Install and configure kubectl

  1. If you already have kubectl CLI, run kubectl version --short to check the version. You need v1.10 or newer. If your kubectl is older, follow the next step to install a newer version.

  2. Install the kubectl CLI.

Access Gardener

  1. Create a project in the Gardener dashboard. This will essentially create a Kubernetes namespace with the name garden-<my-project>.

  2. Configure access to your Gardener project using a kubeconfig. If you are not the Gardener Administrator already, you can create a technical user in the Gardener dashboard: go to the “Members” section and add a service account. You can then download the kubeconfig for your project. You can skip this step if you create your cluster using the user interface; it is only needed for programmatic access, make sure you set export KUBECONFIG=garden-my-project.yaml in your shell. Download kubeconfig for Gardener

Creating a Kubernetes cluster

You can create your cluster using kubectl cli by providing a cluster specification yaml file. You can find an example for GCP here. Make sure the namespace matches that of your project. Then just apply the prepared so-called “shoot” cluster CRD with kubectl:

$ kubectl apply --filename my-cluster.yaml

The easier alternative is to create the cluster following the cluster creation wizard in the Gardener dashboard: shoot creation

Configure kubectl for your cluster

You can now download the kubeconfig for your freshly created cluster in the Gardener dashboard or via cli as follows:

$ kubectl --namespace shoot--my-project--my-cluster get secret kubecfg --output jsonpath={.data.kubeconfig} | base64 --decode > my-cluster.yaml

This kubeconfig file has full administrators access to you cluster. For the rest of this guide be sure you have export KUBECONFIG=my-cluster.yaml set.

Cleaning up

Use the Gardener dashboard to delete your cluster, or execute the following with kubectl pointing to your garden-my-project.yaml kubeconfig:

$ kubectl --kubeconfig garden-my-project.yaml --namespace garden--my-project annotate shoot my-cluster confirmation.garden.sapcloud.io/deletion=true
$ kubectl --kubeconfig garden-my-project.yaml --namespace garden--my-project delete shoot my-cluster
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