As I was getting ready for Velocity conference (https://conferences.oreilly.com/velocity/vl-eu) and the Kubernetes training by Sebastien Goasguen, I happened to be captured by a spiral of testing.
First, I needed to have a K8s cluster running for said training. Sebastien suggested Minikube, which is a nifty way of having a local K8s cluster on your workstation and play with it. As it was too easy, I went through my K8s the hard way (https://cloudinthealps.mandin.net/2017/09/14/kubernetes-the-hard-way-revival/) on Azure again to be able to work on the real stuff, and use kubectl from my Linux env (embedded in windows 10). And I realized that I might have internet issues during the conference and would be happy to have Minikube running.
So back to square one and to setting up minikube and kubectl properly on Windows.
I tried the easy way, which was to download Minikube for Windows and run it. It obviously failed, and I could not find out why. After some try and fails, I just updated Virtualbox, which I was already using for personnal stuff. I just had then to rest the minkube setup that I had, with “minikube delete” and then start fresh : “minikube start” and voilà, I had a brand new Minikube+kubectl setup fully on Windows 10 (and a backup on Linux and Azure).
But as I was working on that, I stumbled on a news there about Azure Stack (https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/azure/en-US/131985bd-bc56-4c35-bde8-640ac7a44299/microsoft-azure-stack-development-kit-201709283-now-available-released-10102017?forum=AzureStack) and specifically the AS SDK, which allows for a one node setup of Azure Stack.
This tickled my curiosity gene. A quick Google to find if there was any tutorials or advice on running nested Azure Stack on Azure, and here am I, setting up just that.
Keep in mind that the required VM (E16s-V3) is just above 1€/hour, which means 800€ monthly, so do not forget the auto-shutdown if you need to control your costs 🙂
The guide I followed is there : https://azurestack.blog/2017/07/deploy-azure-stack-development-kit-on-an-azure-vm/
I did almost everything using the Azure portal, maybe it might be useful to build a script to do that more quickly.
Note that the email with the download link takes some time to be sent, so you might start with that. Or you can use the direct link : https://aka.ms/azurestackdevkitdownloader
And this first test did not work out the way I expected. There were many differences between the article, the official doc, and what I encountered while deploying. Back again to first step, I redeployed the VM, redownloaded the SDK, and started from scratch, following the official doc (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-stack/azure-stack-deploy), I just added the tweak to skip the Physical host check, in order for the installation to continue even though it was running on a VM.
After a few hours, Voilà I had a fully running Azure Stack, within an Azure VM!
Now I just have to read the manual and play with it. This’ll be the subject of a future post, keep checking!