kind cluster
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kind is a very useful tool to quickly standup and teardown kubernetes clusters. I use it to run clusters locally. Generally they are short lived clusters for...

Date: July 2, 2024

kind <https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/>{.hoverlink} is a very useful tool to quickly standup and teardown kubernetes clusters. I use it to run clusters locally. Generally they are short lived clusters for trying, testing, and learning about kubernetes.

Kind is Kubernetes in Docker, its very fast to get a new cluster up and running. Other than checking a box in docker desktop it is the easiest way currently to get a cluster up and running. I’ve used docker desktop for k8s before I really developed on k8s and it was buggy at the time and sometimes started and sometimes didn’t, when it didnt I had no idea how to fix it. I’d suggest kind as the best option to get a cluster up and running locally.

Not Production
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If you are looking for a production ready cluster this is not it. I really like k3s <https://k3s.io/>{.hoverlink}. At the time that I chose k3s it was the most lightweight option that easily supported multi-node clusters.

Starting a kind cluster
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The first step, and maybe only one that you need is to create a cluster and give it a name. This command will edit your $KUBECONFIG file, and set the kind cluster as your default cluster to interact with.

```
kind create cluster --name <CLUSTER_NAME>
```

Using podman <https://podman.io/> as a backend
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I use podman as my docker engine, kind works with docker and podman, but docker by default, in order to switch to podman you need to set an environment variable.

```
export KIND_EXPERIMENTAL_PROVIDER=podman
```

This will tell kind to use podman as the backend provider instead of docker.

Loading images
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If your images are not publically available from a registry, you can load them in kind using the kind load docker-image command.

```
kind load docker-image $REPOSITORY:$TAG --name <CLUSTER_NAME>
```

NOTE
│ ```
│  the CLUSTER_NAME is the name that you gave kind when you started the kind cluster.
│ ```

Argocd
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Argocd is a great way to setup gitops workflows in kubernetes. compared to just hand-rolling kubectl apply, argo holds the state and is able to not only apply new and change, but cleanup removed things.

setting up a kind cluster with argocd installed </kind-cluster-with-argo/>

You can stand up argocd in kind for learning argo or getting a nice visual. But often when I use kind its overkill. The cluster is not long lived, I don’t care if things are not cleaned up, and I want to quickly apply changes without a commit and push to a git </glossary/git/> repo.