There are several methods of getting Kubernetes installed on physical tin, or just on top of your favorite OS. Many developers will probably have some familiarity with minikube. That is a great self-contained quick start configuration for hacking on your laptop.

That’s not really what we want here. We want a fully featured multi-node cluster installed on physical hosts. There are a number of ways to achieve that. They range in terms of flexibility vs convenience, vendor tie-in and so on.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be providing more in-depth evaluations of some of these implementations. For now here are the resources:

Manual and semi-manual

Kubernetes the hard way is a really complete introduction to getting Kubernetes up and running entirely manually. It’s a great starting point if you want to understand the dirty details of how the components hang together.

kubespray is an ansible repo that does the heavy lifting for you. You simply need to provide your ansible inventory and away you go.

kops is a neat little cli for setting up clusters and managing them throughout the lifecycle.

Packaged

Gravity is an installer and containerized kubernetes offering from Gravitational. The stack includes helpful built-in components like tiller. In addition it provides a full cluster management service (as part of the paid-for enterprise version)

Rancher is also a pre-packaged Kubernetes offering from the company of the same name.

Openshift is the RedHat offering of Kubernetes.

On prem Kubernetes is a fast-growing area. I’m sure I have not captured all of the available offerings. If you feel like I’ve missed an important one, and you’d like to see it evaluated, leave a commend and I’ll add it to the mix.