Create a Kubernetes cluster

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform. It means that you can use Kubernetes to deploy, scale, and manage containerized applications.

In production, Kubernetes is used to manage a cluster of nodes, such as those located on cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure, or on your own on-premises infrastructure.

Here, you learn how to do this using Minikube, a handy tool that allows you to run a Kubernetes cluster on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

What if I have a production Kubernetes cluster?

If you are looking to deploy Weaviate on a production Kubernetes cluster, the steps are similar. You will just need to replace Minikube with your production Kubernetes cluster.

As there are many variations in Kubernetes deployments, we recommend you follow the deployment instructions provided by your cloud provider or Kubernetes distribution for this purpose.

Prerequisites

For this tutorial, you will need the following tools:

• Minikube: a tool that runs a Kubernetes cluster on your local machine. It is used to test Kubernetes deployments locally.
• kubectl: the Kubernetes command-line tool. It is used to interact with the Kubernetes cluster.
• Docker: a platform that allows you to develop, ship, and run applications in containers. We install Docker as the Minikube driver to virtualize the Kubernetes cluster on your local machine. Your Minikube may use a different driver, but Docker is the most common one.
• Helm: a package manager for Kubernetes. It is used to install and manage applications on Kubernetes.

Installation

If you don't have any of these tools installed, you can follow the installation instructions for each, by following the links below:

• Minikube
• kubectl
• Docker
• helm

Once you've done so, confirm installation by running the following commands:

minikube version
kubectl version --client
docker --version
helm version

You should see an output like:

minikube version: v1.32.0
commit: 8220a6eb95f0a4d75f7f2d7b14cef975f050512d
Client Version: v1.28.2
Kustomize Version: v5.0.4-0.20230601165947-6ce0bf390ce3
Docker version 24.0.7, build afdd53b
version.BuildInfo{Version:"v3.12.2", GitCommit:"1e210a2c8cc5117d1055bfaa5d40f51bbc2e345e", GitTreeState:"clean", GoVersion:"go1.20.6"}

If you see similar output, you are ready to proceed.

Note that the versions may differ from the ones shown above. Please make sure you have the latest versions installed.

Run Minikube

You are now ready to start Minikube. Run the following command:

minikube start

Then, you might see an output like this:

😄  minikube v1.32.0 on Darwin 14.4.1 (arm64)
✨  Automatically selected the docker driver. Other choices: vmware, ssh
📌  Using Docker Desktop driver with root privileges
👍  Starting control plane node minikube in cluster minikube
🚜  Pulling base image ...
💾  Downloading Kubernetes v1.28.3 preload ...
    > preloaded-images-k8s-v18-v1...:  341.16 MiB / 341.16 MiB  100.00% 42.00 M
    > gcr.io/k8s-minikube/kicbase...:  410.56 MiB / 410.58 MiB  100.00% 42.28 M
🔥  Creating docker container (CPUs=2, Memory=8100MB) ...
🐳  Preparing Kubernetes v1.28.3 on Docker 24.0.7 ...
    ▪ Generating certificates and keys ...
    ▪ Booting up control plane ...
    ▪ Configuring RBAC rules ...
🔗  Configuring bridge CNI (Container Networking Interface) ...
🔎  Verifying Kubernetes components...
    ▪ Using image gcr.io/k8s-minikube/storage-provisioner:v5
🌟  Enabled addons: storage-provisioner, default-storageclass
🏄  Done! kubectl is now configured to use "minikube" cluster and "default" namespace by default

Great! You have started a Kubernetes cluster using Minikube. Note the last comment that says kubectl is now configured to use "minikube" cluster and "default" namespace by default. So, you can now use kubectl to interact with the Kubernetes cluster.

Verify the cluster

If you run the following command:

kubectl get pods -A

This will show you the pods running in the cluster. You should see something like this:

NAMESPACE     NAME                               READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
kube-system   coredns-5dd5756b68-qhfch           1/1     Running   0          26s
kube-system   etcd-minikube                      1/1     Running   0          42s
kube-system   kube-apiserver-minikube            1/1     Running   0          40s
kube-system   kube-controller-manager-minikube   1/1     Running   0          42s
kube-system   kube-proxy-xwdgf                   1/1     Running   0          26s
kube-system   kube-scheduler-minikube            1/1     Running   0          40s
kube-system   storage-provisioner                1/1     Running   0          39s

If your output is similar to the one above, then congratulations! You have successfully spun up a Kubernetes cluster on your local machine using Minikube.

Next, you will learn how to deploy Weaviate to the Kubernetes cluster using Helm.

Questions and feedback

If you have any questions or feedback, let us know in the user forum.

• Technical questions
• Documentation feedback