KinD in Kubernetes for Windows

We love Kubernetes in Docker (aka KinD). KinD can stand up a Cluster in seconds! So lets me show you how you can do this for Windows.

A lot of people utilize the Kube Controller CLI directly into an environment such as GKS or EKS. However, this article is showing how to prepare an orchestration prior to implementation on a development machine. Let’s begin.

Note: Pre-requisites. This article is under the assumption that you already have knowledge in Docker and have Docker already configured and installed. If you do not please, have Docker Desktop instead. You can follow the instructions here: https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-windows/install/

So the first thing we want to make sure is installed is https://chocolatey.org/. Chocolatey (aka Choco) is a package manager that can be used with Windows. We will install Chocalety by using the following command within Powershell (v 3+)“WITH ADMINISTRATIVE” privileges:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; iwr https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1 -UseBasicParsing | iex

Also found at https://chocolatey.org/docs/installation#more-install-options

After that Chocolatey is installed.

Now before we being installing KinD we are going to install the KubeCTR cli. We are going to do this so that our context is properly written whenever we create a KinD cluster. We can install the Kube Controller CLI by running:

choco install kubernetes-cli

We are going to install KinD. Again make sure that you are in an “Administrative” window.

choco install kind

Let's verify that we have KinD installed correctly. Check the version with the following.

kind --version

Great! Now let's create our first cluster.

Make a directory that will be used for our YAML file. Use any IDE. I will be utilizing Visual Studio Code. Inside of the directory create a “kind-env.yaml” file. You can create the final name to whatever you like.

The file will look something like the below:

kind: Cluster
apiVersion: kind.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4