Kubernetes quickstarts – AKS, EKS, GKE

There has been a lot of inquiries about how to get started quickly with what is commonly referred as the hyperscalers. Let’s dive in for a super quick primer!

All of these quickstarts assume the reader has accounts in each service with the appropriate rights and in most cases the reader needs to have the client installed.

Starting with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

export NAME="$(whoami)-$RANDOM"
export ZONE="us-west2-a"
gcloud container clusters create "${NAME}" --zone ${ZONE} --num-nodes=1
glcoud container clusters get-credentials "${NAME}" --zone ${ZONE}

Moving on to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

export NAME="$(whoami)-$RANDOM"
export AZURE_RESOURCE_GROUP="${NAME}-group"
az group create --name "${AZURE_RESOURCE_GROUP}" -l westus2
az aks create --resource-group "${AZURE_RESOURCE_GROUP}" --name "${NAME}"
az aks get-credentials --resource-group "${AZURE_RESOURCE_GROUP}" --name "${NAME}"

For Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

export NAME="$(whoami)-$RANDOM"
eksctl create cluster --name "${NAME}"

As you can see setting up these clusters is very simple. Now that you have a cluster what are you going to do with it? Ensure you’ve installed the tools needed to manage the cluster. You’ll want to get the credentials from each copy into ~/{user}/.kube/config (except with eksctl as it copies the kubeconfig to the appropriate place automagically). To manipulate the cluster, install kubectl with your favorite package manager and to install applications the easiest way is via helm.

As you can see the setup of a kubernetes cluster in one of the major hyperscalers is very easy. A few lines of code and you’re up and running. Add those lines into a shell script and standing up clusters can be a single command…just don’t forget to tear it down when you’re done!

CloudinstallationKubernetesPlatform Engineer