If you had a chance to deploy Azure Stack or Azure Stack Development Kit (ASDK) in your environment, maybe you’ve asked yourself “OK, but what should I do with it now?“.

Well, one of many things you “can do with it” is offer your users to deploy Kubernetes clusters on top of it (at least, that was what I did the other day… on my ASDK deployment) – in short, official documentation has you pretty much covered. I know, Azure enables it as well… and the process here is similar, or – the same.

The main thing you have to decide at the beginning, is if you’ll use Azure AD or ADFS for identity management (the same as with Azure Stack deployment, if you remember, from my previous posts). Why – because the installation steps differ a bit.

Once you decide it (or you ask your Azure Stack administrator how it’s done in your case), you can proceed with the installation – I assume you have your Azure Stack/ASDK up and running.

Next, in the admin portal (https://adminportal.local.azurestack.external/), you’ll need to add the prerequisites from Azure Marketplace (for this, if you remember, your Azure Stack/ASDK has to be registered):

Once done, you’re ready to set up the service principal, to which you’ll then assign the required permissions on both – the Azure side and on the Azure Stack side! (don’t forget this detail… it is well documented, but easy to overlook)

In case you don’t give your service principal the required permissions on both “sides”, you’ll probably get the “error 12” and your deployment will fail:

And you can see details in the log:

So… be careful with service principal and permissions! 🙂

Next thing you’ll need to make sure of is that you create a plan and an offer, but set your quotas right! It depends on your Kubernetes cluster deployment settings, but if you’ll go with the defaults, the default quotas (disk, in particular) need to be expanded!

If not, you’ll probably get this error:

If you were careful while reading the official docs (with a few “lessons learned” in this post), and you’ve made it to here… you’re probably set to deploy your first Kubernetes cluster on top of your Azure Stack/ASDK.

In the user portal (https://portal.local.azurestack.external/), you now have the option to deploy something called Kubernetes Cluster (preview):

Here you really can’t miss much – you’ll give your deployment a brand new (or empty) resource group, user details (together with your public SSH key, of course), DNS prefix, number and size of nodes and service principal details:

After that, your deployment starts and runs for some time (it, again, depends on your hardware and settings you’ve chosen for your cluster). Hopefully, it will end with this message:

If all is good, you can SSH into one of your master nodes and see the details of your cluster:

One other thing that would be nice to have is the Kubernetes dashboard – the process of enabling it is well documented here:

And – you’re done!

You now have your own Kubernetes cluster deployment on top of your Azure Stack/ASDK! How cool is that?! 🙂

One last thing to note – currently, this is in preview (as it says on the template), but… it works. 🙂

Cheers!