# Deploying a Kubernetes Cluster in Strasbourg?! ## TL;DR: The code %[https://github.com/dirien/quick-bites/tree/main/pulumi-ovh-kube] ## Introduction Thanks to the posts of [Aurélie Vache](https://twitter.com/aurelievache), I discovered the [OVH Managed Kubernetes Service](https://www.ovh.com/en/kubernetes/). %[https://twitter.com/aurelievache/status/1689173513851043840?s=20] I had already heard about it, but I had never tried it. So I decided to give it a try and use [Pulumi](https://www.pulumi.com) to deploy a Kubernetes cluster in the [OVH](https://www.ovh.com/) data center in Strasbourg. What could be better than a Kubernetes cluster in Strasbourg, one of the European Union capitals, to deploy a Minecraft server? ## Prerequisites * [Pulumi](https://www.pulumi.com/docs/get-started/install/) * [Pulumi Account](https://app.pulumi.com/signup) - this is optional, but convenient to handle the state of stack. * [OVH Account](https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/public-cloud/) - this is required to use the OVH Managed Kubernetes Service. * kubectl - this is required to interact with the Kubernetes cluster. You can install it by following the instructions [here](https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/install-kubectl/). * [Go](https://golang.org/doc/install) * Minecraft client - this is required to connect to the Minecraft server. You can download it [here](https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/download). ## Create a Pulumi Project Everything starts with a Pulumi project. Let's create one and we will use the Golang as our programming language of choice. ```bash mkdir pulumi-ovh-kube cd pulumi-ovh-kube pulumi new go --force ``` For the sake of simplicity, we can keep all the default values in the wizard. Now, we need to install the OVH provider for Pulumi. We can do that by running the following command: ```bash go get github.com/dirien/pulumi-ovh/sdk ``` Now, we can start writing our code. Open the `main.go` file and replace the content with the following code: ```go package main import ( "github.com/dirien/pulumi-ovh/sdk/go/ovh/cloudproject" "github.com/pulumi/pulumi/sdk/v3/go/pulumi" "github.com/pulumi/pulumi/sdk/v3/go/pulumi/config" ) func main() { pulumi.Run(func(ctx *pulumi.Context) error { serviceName := config.Require(ctx, "serviceName") mykube, err := cloudproject.NewKube(ctx, "mykube", &cloudproject.KubeArgs{ ServiceName: pulumi.String(serviceName), Name: pulumi.String("myFirstOVHKubernetesCluster"), Region: pulumi.String("SBG5"), }) if err != nil { return err } ctx.Export("kubeconfig", mykube.Kubeconfig) nodePool, err := cloudproject.NewKubeNodePool(ctx, "mykubenodepool", &cloudproject.KubeNodePoolArgs{ ServiceName: pulumi.String(serviceName), KubeId: mykube.ID(), Name: pulumi.String("default"), Autoscale: pulumi.BoolPtr(true), DesiredNodes: pulumi.Int(1), MinNodes: pulumi.Int(1), MaxNodes: pulumi.Int(2), FlavorName: pulumi.String("d2-8"), MonthlyBilled: pulumi.BoolPtr(false), }) if err != nil { return err } ctx.Export("nodePoolId", nodePool.ID()) return nil }) } ``` This code will create a Kubernetes cluster in the OVH data center in Strasbourg (`SBG5`). Additionally, it will create a node pool with 2 nodes. The node pool will be configured to scale between 1 and 2 nodes and I want that it starts with 1 (`desiredNodes`). The node pool will use the flavor `d2-8` which is a flavor with 4 vCPUs and 8GB of RAM from the so-called `Discover` range. These instances are perfect for test, development and sandbox environments and Minecraft is a sandbox game, so it fits perfectly! ## Add the Kubernetes provider Before deploying applications in our Kubernetes clusters, we need to add the Kubernetes provider to our project as we are going to run the Minecraft server as a container. I wrote a dedicated blog post about the usage of Helm charts in Pulumi, go check it out: %[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-use-pulumi-kubernetes-provider-helm-resource-engin-diri] We need to add the Kubernetes provider like this: ```bash go get github.com/pulumi/pulumi-kubernetes/sdk/v4 ``` And after we successfully added the Kubernetes provider, we can add the following code to the `main.go` file: ```go package main import ( "github.com/dirien/pulumi-ovh/sdk/go/ovh/cloudproject" k8s "github.com/pulumi/pulumi-kubernetes/sdk/v4/go/kubernetes" "github.com/pulumi/pulumi-kubernetes/sdk/v4/go/kubernetes/helm/v3" "github.com/pulumi/pulumi/sdk/v3/go/pulumi" "github.com/pulumi/pulumi/sdk/v3/go/pulumi/config" ) func main() { pulumi.Run(func(ctx *pulumi.Context) error { // truncated for brevity k8sProvider, err := k8s.NewProvider(ctx, "k8s", &k8s.ProviderArgs{ Kubeconfig: mykube.Kubeconfig, }, pulumi.DependsOn([]pulumi.Resource{nodePool, mykube})) if err != nil { return err } _, err = helm.NewRelease(ctx, "minecraft", &helm.ReleaseArgs{ Chart: pulumi.String("minecraft"), Version: pulumi.String("4.9.3"), RepositoryOpts: &helm.RepositoryOptsArgs{ Repo: pulumi.String("https://itzg.github.io/minecraft-server-charts"), }, CreateNamespace: pulumi.Bool(true), Namespace: pulumi.String("minecraft"), Values: pulumi.Map{ "minecraftServer": pulumi.Map{ "eula": pulumi.Bool(true), "motd": pulumi.String("OVH Strasbourg - Minecraft Server"), "serviceType": pulumi.String("LoadBalancer"), }, }, }, pulumi.Provider(k8sProvider)) if err != nil { return err } return nil }) } ``` This code will programmatically create a Kubernetes provider using the `kubeconfig` of the Kubernetes cluster we just created. One thing to note here is the `pulumi.DependsOn([]pulumi.Resource{nodePool, mykube})` part. This will make sure that the Kubernetes provider is created after the Kubernetes cluster AND the node pool are created. Because we need the be able to schedule pods on the Kubernetes cluster. Only the Kubernetes API up and running is not enough. Secondly, it will create a Helm release using the `itzg/minecraft-server-charts` chart. This chart will create a vanilla Java Minecraft server with a load balancer service, so that we can connect to the Minecraft server from the internet. %[https://github.com/itzg/minecraft-server-charts] ## Deploy the stack > Don't forget to set the `serviceName` configuration value to the name of your OVH Public Cloud project and add this to the `Pulumi.yaml` file. > > ```yaml > config: > serviceName: > ``` Also, don't forget to set the `OVH_APPLICATION_KEY`, `OVH_APPLICATION_SECRET`, `OVH_CONSUMER_KEY` and `OVH_ENDPOINT` environment variables. Now, we can deploy the stack by running the following command: ```bash go mod tidy pulumi up ``` This will take a few minutes, because it needs to create the Kubernetes cluster and the node pool. ![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1691655970491/f0fb4f85-4269-4f0a-8634-4a16ceeb2238.png align="center") ![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1691655975835/17abb9ff-847e-4999-a66d-6db290e7eda3.png align="center") ## Connect to the Minecraft server To connect to the Minecraft server, we need to get the IP address of the load balancer service. We can do that by running the following command: ```bash pulumi stack output kubeconfig --show-secrets > kubeconfig.yaml kubectl --kubeconfig=kubeconfig.yaml get svc -n minecraft -o jsonpath='{.items[0].status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}' ``` This will give us the kubeconfig file we defined as output in the `main.go` file, and the `kubectl` command will be used to get the IP address of the load balancer service. Now, we can connect to the Minecraft server using the IP address we just got: ![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1691655947425/0667f69e-fd76-432a-ba51-72510863de4d.png align="center") ![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1691655952932/ad72187b-69f4-4462-a647-0596b7303852.png align="center") ## Housekeeping To clean up the resources we created, we can run the following command: ```bash pulumi destroy ``` This will destroy all the resources we created. ## Conclusion We saw how easy it is to use Pulumi to create infrastructure as code. This time, we used the OVH Public Cloud and it was a breeze to create a Kubernetes cluster and deploy a Minecraft server on it.