Deploying Kubernetes on Azure

I recently looked to do my first live deployment of kubernetes, after having playing succesfully with minikube.

When trying to deploy kubernetes in public cloud, there is a couple of base options. You could start from scratch or use one of the turnkey solutions.

You have two turnkey solutions fro Azure, Fannel or Weave based. Basically these are two different networking solutions, but the actual turnkey solutions differ more than just the networking layer. I tried both and had issues with both, yeay!! However, I liked the fannel solution over Weave’s straight away. Flannel’s seems to be able to configure and used Azure better. For example, It uses a VM scale sets for the slave nodes, and configures external ips and security groups. This might be because the Flannel solution is sponsored by Microsoft, so I ended up focusing on it over Weave’s.

The documentation is not bad, but a bit short on some basic details. I  did the deployment in both Ubuntu 14.04 and OSX10 and worked in both. The documetation details jq and docker as the main dependencies. I found issues with older versions of jq that are part of the 14.04 Ubuntu archive, so make sure to install the lastest version from the jq website.

Ultimately, Kube-up.sh seems to be a basic configuration wrapper around azkube, a link to it is burried at the end of the kubernetes doc. Cole Mickens is the main developer for azkube and the turnkey soultion. While looking around his github profile, I found this very useful link on the status of support for Kubernetes in Azure. I would hope this eventually lands in the main kubernetes doc site.

As part of the first install instructions, you will need to provide the subscription and tenant id. I found the subscription id easily enough from the web console, but the tenant id was a bit more elusive. Altough the tenant id is not required for installations of 1.3, the script failed to execute without it. It seems like the best way to find it is the Azure cli tool, which you can get from node.js


npm install azure
azure login
azure account show


This will give you ll the details that you need to set it up. You can then just go ahead or you can edit deatils in  cluster/azure/config-default.sh

You might want to edit the number of VMs that the operation will create. Once you run kube-up.sh, you should hopefully get a working kubernetes deployment.

If for any reason, you would like to change the version to be install, you will need to edit the file called “version” under the kubernetes folder setup by the first installation step.

The deployment comes with a ‘utils’ script that makes it very simple do a few things. One is to copy the ssh key that will give you access to the slaves to the master.

$ ./util.sh copykey

From the master, you just need to access the internal ip using the “kube” username and specify your private key for authentication.

Next, I would suggest to configure your local kubectl and deploy the SkyDNS addon. You will really need this to easly access services.

$ ./util.sh configure-kubectl

$ kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/colemickens/azkube/v0.0.5/templates/coreos/addons/skydns.yaml

And that is it, if you run kubectl get nodes, you will be able to see the master and the slaves.

Since Azure does not have direct integretion for loadbalancer, any services that you expose you will need to configure with a self-deployed solution. But it seems that version 1.4  ofKubernetes is comming with equivalent support for Azure that the current versions boast for  AWS and Co.