kube-spawn: testing multi-node Kubernetes clusters on Linux systems
2017-10-22, 07:30–07:55 (UTC), Galerie

kube-spawn is a tool to easily start a local, multi-node Kubernetes cluster on a Linux machine. While it was originally meant to be used mainly by developers of Kubernetes, it has been turned into a tool that is great for just trying Kubernetes out. In this talk, I will give a general introduction to kube-spawn and cover integration issues.


kube-spawn aims to become the easiest means of testing and fiddling with Kubernetes on Linux. It provides an environment that Kubernetes will eventually be running on, a full Linux OS. On the host side, end users are able to run native Kubernetes command-line tools to get every nodes and pods to work. For each container, kube-spawn bootstaps each instance based on CoreOS Container Linux, with the help of systemd-nspawn.

In this talk I will introduce kube-spawn briefly from the perspective of end users. After that, I'm going to cover several integration issues, which have been discovered during implementation. It will range from administration tools like kubeadm to low-level issues such as btrfs-based storage pools.