Provisioning an external IP address for local Kubernetes

Some platforms for deploying local Kubernetes clusters don't have the ability to provide external IP addresses when creating Kubernetes services with the service type LoadBalancer. The following steps enable this ability for a few platforms. You should follow these steps before installing Epinio.

K3s/K3d

The provision of LoadBalancer IP is enabled by default.

Kind

• Install jq

• Install and configure MetalLB

  kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/metallb/metallb/v0.9.5/manifests/namespace.yaml
  kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/metallb/metallb/v0.9.5/manifests/metallb.yaml
  kubectl create secret generic -n metallb-system memberlist --from-literal=secretkey="$(openssl rand -base64 128)"

  SUBNET_IP=`docker network inspect kind | jq -r '.[0].IPAM.Config[0].Gateway'`
  # Use the last few IP addresses
  IP_ARRAY=(${SUBNET_IP//./ })
  SUBNET_IP="${IP_ARRAY[0]}.${IP_ARRAY[1]}.255.255"

  cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
  apiVersion: v1
  kind: ConfigMap
  metadata:
    namespace: metallb-system
    name: config
  data:
    config: |
      address-pools:
      - name: default
        protocol: layer2
        addresses:
        - ${SUBNET_IP}/28
  EOF

MicroK8s

Install and configure MetalLB:

INTERFACE=`ip route | grep default | awk '{print $5}'`
IP=`ifconfig $INTERFACE | sed -n '2 p' | awk '{print $2}'`
microk8s enable metallb:${IP}/16

Digital Ocean

When installing Epinio on Rancher-provisioned RKE2 or RKE1 clusters on Digital Ocean, you might see this error message:

error installing Epinio:
timed out waiting for LoadBalancer IP on traefik service
Ensure your kubernetes platform has the ability to provision a LoadBalancer IP address.

If this happens you need to configure RKE/RKE2 with an external cloud provider such as the Digital Ocean CC Manager.