This playbook will build a HA Kubernetes cluster with k3s, kube-vip, MetalLB, and Cilium via ansible.

Cilium installation is done via helm to ensure easy upgrades and future customization of values

Build a Kubernetes cluster with a built-in service mesh using Ansible with k3s. The goal is easily install a HA Kubernetes cluster on machines running:

• Debian
• Ubuntu
• CentOS

on processor architecture:

• x64
• arm64
• armhf

• Deployment environment must have Ansible 2.4.0+.
• server and agent nodes should have passwordless SSH access, if not you can supply arguments to provide credentials --ask-pass --ask-become-pass to each command.

First create a new directory based on the sample directory within the inventory directory:

cp -R inventory/sample inventory/my-cluster

Second, edit inventory/my-cluster/hosts.ini to match the system information gathered above

For example:

[master]
192.168.30.38
192.168.30.39
192.168.30.40

[node]
192.168.30.41
192.168.30.42

[k3s_cluster:children]
master
node

If multiple hosts are in the master group, the playbook will automatically set up k3s in HA mode with etcd.

This requires at least k3s version 1.19.1 however the version is configurable by using the k3s_version variable.

If needed, you can also edit inventory/my-cluster/group_vars/all.yml to match your environment.

Start provisioning of the cluster using the following command:

ansible-playbook site.yml -i inventory/my-cluster/hosts.ini

After deployment control plane will be accessible via virtual ip-address which is defined in inventory/group_vars/all.yml as apiserver_endpoint

ansible-playbook reset.yml -i inventory/my-cluster/hosts.ini

You should also reboot these nodes due to the VIP not being destroyed

To copy your kube config locally so that you can access your Kubernetes cluster run:

scp debian@master_ip:~/.kube/config ~/.kube/config

Thanks to these repos for code and ideas:

• k3s-io/k3s-ansible
• techno-tim/k3s-ansible