Create a VM (Virtual Machine)

1. Click on Compute Engine

2. Enable Compute Engine API. It will take a minute or so!

   

3. Click on Create Instance

4. Give name, region and machine type of your choice.

   

5. On boot disk, click on Change

   • We will use Ubuntu image with 100 GB boot disk.

     

6. Give full access to all Cloud APIs and allow HTTP/s traffic.

   

7. Click on Create

   • It will take a couple of minutes to create the VM.

Accessing VM using SSH keys

• GCP VMs can be accessed using a browser window too, but it's not efficient.

  

• We are going to use a more traditional and efficient method to access and exec into a VM, i.e. using SSH keys.

Steps

Generating SSH Keys

1. Generate SSH Keys : ssh-keygen -b 2048 -t rsa

   • -b 2048 - is optional. It says that the length of the key should be 2048 bytes.

     

   • You can give a custom name for your key

   • If you want you can keep the paraphrase empty.

2. Now, go to the search bar, and type SSH

   • Select the SSH option which has Compute Engine as its category.

3. Click Add SSH Key

4. Copy the .pub key file content.

   • You can use cat command - cat test.pub

5. Paste the content in the input.

6. Click on Save

Connecting to VM

1. Now open up your terminal.

2. Copy the external IP of your VM instance.

   

3. Now on your terminal, enter the following command:

    ssh username@IP_ADDRESS -i ./location_of_your_private_key
   

   • username can be found in your public SSH key

   • SSH Private key is the file without any extension, in my case - test

4. Click Enter.

5. Type yes, when asked for it.

6. Now you are successfully able to access your VM.

Connecting via VSCode

• VSCode has an extension which enables us to connect your VSCode Editor to the VM instance.

  • It helps us to navigate files and folders very easily and frequently.

• Install the below extensions:

  1. Remote SSH - by Microsoft

     

  2. Remote - SSH: Editing Configuration Files

     

  3. Click Ctrl + Shift + P

  4. Type SSH and select Remote - SSH: Add New Host

  5. Enter the SSH command as given in the above section.

     • Select the config location where you want to store your config.

  6. Again press Ctrl + Shift + P, and type SSH

  7. Select Remote - SSH: Connect to Host

  8. Select the IP of the VM you want to connect to.

  9. Now your VSCode is connected to your VM.

Installing Docker

1. First, run the below commands to upgrade and update local dependencies:

    sudo apt-get upgrade
    sudo apt-get update
   

2. If you want to install Vim or Neovim as text editor, run below command (Optional)

    sudo apt-get install neovim
   

3. Now follow the installation steps here - Official Docs Link

   1. Run this command to remove old installation packages and files

       for pkg in docker.io docker-doc docker-compose docker-compose-v2 podman-docker containerd runc; do sudo apt-get remove $pkg; done
      

   2. Installing using apt repository:

      1. Setup Docker's apt repository:

          # Add Docker's official GPG key:
          sudo apt-get update
          sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg
          sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
          curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
          sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
         
          # Add the repository to Apt sources:
          echo \
            "deb [arch="$(dpkg --print-architecture)" signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
            "$(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME")" stable" | \
            sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
          sudo apt-get update
         

      2. Install Docker packages:

          sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin
         

      3. Verify the Docker-Engine installation

          sudo docker run hello-world
         

   3. Other ways to install docker:

      1. Installing from a package - Link

      2. Installing using convenience script - Link

   4. Uninstall docker - Link

4. Post Installation Steps

   • Docker daemon binds to a Unix socket and not a TCP port.

   • By default, it is accessed by sudo

   • If you don't want to use the docker command with sudo, create a Unix group called docker and add users to it.

   • Steps:

     1. Run below commands:

        • First create a group docker and then add a USER to it

            sudo groupadd docker
            sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

1. Now log out and log in back to evaluate your group membership OR

   Run the following:

    newgrp docker
   

2. Verify whether docker runs without sudo or not:

    docker run hello-world
   

3. Configure Docker to start on boot with systemd

    sudo systemctl enable docker.service
    sudo systemctl enable containerd.service
   

4. For more, follow this doc - Link

Installing gcloud CLI

• We have to install gcloud CLI to interact with GKE clusters.

• I am following this doc - Link

• Steps:

  1. Run the below commands and install the required dependencies:

      sudo apt-get update
      sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https ca-certificates gnupg curl sudo
     

  2. Add the gcloud CLI distribution URI as a package source.

      echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/cloud.google.gpg] https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt cloud-sdk main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-cloud-sdk.list
     

  3. Import Google Cloud Public Key

      curl https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg | sudo apt-key --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/cloud.google.gpg add -
     

  4. Update and install gcloud CLI:

      sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install google-cloud-cli
     

• Note:

  • If facing error

    Conflicting values set for option Signed-By regarding source https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/ cloud-sdk: /usr/share/keyrings/cloud.google.asc !=

    E: The list of sources could not be read.

    • RUN:

        cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d
        sudo rm google-cloud-sdk.list
      

    • Then apply the above steps again.

1. Run gcloud init

   • Select Log in with a new account

   • Open the link in your browser.

     • Sign up with the Google account that you used for your GCP account

     • Copy the authorization code and paste it into the terminal.

     • Select the project you want to work with.

     • Enter n for configuring default Compute Region and Zone.

Installing kubectl

• Follow this doc to install in kubectl in Linux

• Steps:

  1. Run the below command to download latest release

         curl -LO "https://dl.k8s.io/release/$(curl -L -s https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable.txt)/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl"
     

  2. Validate binary:

      curl -LO "https://dl.k8s.io/release/$(curl -L -s https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable.txt)/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl.sha256"
      echo "$(cat kubectl.sha256)  kubectl" | sha256sum --check
     

     • If valid, the output is:

         kubectl: OK
       

  3. Install kubectl

      sudo install -o root -g root -m 0755 kubectl /usr/local/bin/kubectl
     

  4. Test kubectl

      kubectl version --client
     

Installing minikube

Minikube is local Kubernetes, focusing on making it easy to learn and develop for Kubernetes.

• Follow this doc: Link

• Steps:

  1. Run the following commands:

      curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube_latest_amd64.deb
      sudo dpkg -i minikube_latest_amd64.deb
      minikube start
     

  2. Interact with your cluster:

      kubectl get po -A
      minikube kubectl -- get po -A
      alias kubectl="minikube kubectl --"
      minikube dashboard
     

  3. Opening dashboard in your local machine:

      ssh  -L 42767:localhost:42767 USERNAME@EXTERNAL_IP_ADDRESS -i ~/location_of_private_key/
     

  4. Open the dashboard in your local machine:

     http://127.0.0.1:42767/api/v1/namespaces/kubernetes-dashboard/services/http:kubernetes-dashboard:/proxy/#/deployment?namespace=default

     

  5. Enable ingress:

      minikube addons enable ingress
     

  6. Stop and delete all minikube clusters:

      minikube stop
      minikube delete --all
     

Setting up GKE (Using UI)

1. Go to GCP console.

2. Click on Kubernetes Engine

   1. Enable Kubernetes Engine API

3. Click on Create

4. Click on Switch to Standard Cluster

   

5. In Cluster Basics , enter the details as you require.

   

6. Click on default-pool and enter the number of nodes as 3

   

   • Enable the cluster autoscaler.

   • Add a minimum number of nodes as 0 or 1 (up to you) and a maximum as 3.

7. Click on Nodes option under default-pool

   

   • Select image type as Ubuntu with containerd (ubuntu_containerd)

   • Select machine type as per your requirement.

   • Click on Create

8. It will take around 5 mins (or more) to create a GKE cluster.

9. Click on Connect and copy the gcloud command

   

10. Open the terminal and SSH into the VM.

11. For kubectl to work with GKE, we need to install google-cloud-sdk-gke-gcloud-auth-plugin

    sudo apt-get install google-cloud-sdk-gke-gcloud-auth-plugin
    

12. Now paste the command you copied from GKE cluster

13. Check if the cluster can be accessed from local kubectl CLI

    kubectl get ns
    

    

14. Delete the cluster using GUI itself.

    

Conclusion

• In this tutorial, we have seen how to create a GCP VM instance and set up docker, GKE, kubectl and minikube.

• In the next article we are gonna see how to create a GKE cluster using Terraform.