How to create a Managed Kubernetes in 5 minutes with DigitalOcean DOKS

Why use Kubernetes?

In the middle of 2024, it is almost certain that you have already heard of Kubernetes. If you are starting out now, this article is perfect for you! We will guide you through the first steps with Kubernetes in a simple and straightforward way.

You will learn not only how to set up your own Kubernetes cluster, but also understand the benefits it brings to your projects, as well as important tips to avoid common pitfalls in DigitalOcean DOKS.

This is a series of articles, going through each of the Cloud Providers. So, do not miss any on our blog.

What are the benefits of using Kubernetes in your environments?

Scalability: Kubernetes simplifies the scalability of your applications, allowing you to easily scale them as your demand grows.

Resilience: With Kubernetes, your applications are highly resilient. It automatically detects and replaces failed containers or nodes, keeping your applications running reliably.

Portability: Kubernetes is an open-source platform and can be run in virtually any environment, whether locally, in public, or private clouds. This offers the flexibility to move your applications between different cloud providers without major modifications.

Automation: With Kubernetes, you can automate tasks of deployment, updates, and scaling of applications, saving time and reducing human errors.

Giant Ecosystem: Kubernetes has a vast ecosystem of tools and services, making it easy to integrate with other technologies and accelerating application development.

Brief history

Here are some of the most important moments in the history of DigitalOcean Kubernetes Service (DOKS):

• 2018: Introduction of DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS): DigitalOcean launches its managed Kubernetes platform, making it easy for developers and small businesses to create and manage Kubernetes clusters.

• 2019: General Availability (GA): DigitalOcean Kubernetes reaches general availability, providing a stable and reliable platform for users by adding integration with Load Balancers to improve traffic distribution and service availability.

• 2020: Implementation of Persistent Volumes: Addition of support for persistent volumes, allowing data to persist even after pods restart.

• 2021: Autoscaling Support: Introduction of support for autoscaling of nodes and pods, allowing clusters to adjust automatically based on workload.

• 2022: Launch of DigitalOcean Container Registry: Facilitating the storage and management of Docker images directly on DigitalOcean.

• 2023: Integration with Terraform: Improved support for infrastructure as code (IaC) through integration with Terraform, allowing the creation and programmatic management of Kubernetes clusters.

Hands-on

So this is the time to put this Kubernetes thing to work.

Since this is a very direct-to-the-point article, we will create a cluster using DigitalOcean's native tool, “doctl”, as it can be the simplest alternative to clickops and I intend to write more about this in the future.

Installing the “doctl” CLI on Linux (others: here)

cd ~
wget https://github.com/digitalocean/doctl/releases/download/v1.104.0/doctl-1.104.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar xf ~/doctl-1.104.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz
sudo mv ~/doctl /usr/local/bin

Creating a cluster

To avoid creating a cluster with very large machines, we will use the option “s-1vcpu-2gb”:

Before creating the cluster itself, it is necessary to log in with the CLI:

1- Initializing and logging in with the CLI

doctl auth init

2- Create a minimal cluster with the basic machine “s-1vcpu-2gb”:

doctl kubernetes cluster create clusterzinho --size s-1vcpu-2gb --region nyc1

3- Verifying the created cluster:

doctl kubernetes cluster clusterzinho

4- Creating the file for cluster access:

doctl kubernetes cluster kubeconfig save clusterzinho

Do not forget to delete this test cluster 

doctl kubernetes cluster delete clusterzinho

Costs

In your Cloud and Kubernetes strategy, cost is certainly one of the first points taken into consideration and this is also DigitalOcean's strategy to highlight its products in this competitive cloud market, see this chart below which is at the center of the services page:

Of course, this should not be your only concern and the second point of attention is service quality and availability, as they can directly affect your product or service. In our experience here, it performs quite similarly to other providers and perhaps a strategy that can be adopted is to run environments with lower impact here, such as development, for example.

I recommend taking a look at their SLA here and if you wish, they have a very cool case study from BrightData that highlights the fact that they do not charge for network traffic.

Points of Attention

• Enable HA: for production clusters, enabling HA is essential, but remember that once enabled this option cannot be disabled;

• Goodbye local disk on upgrades: remember that data on local disk of the machines is lost during the upgrade process, as machines are replaced with new ones;

• Enable Surge Upgrade: this is a free option that will give you additional peace of mind during upgrade moments, because just like the deployment process in Kubernetes, this service spins up new machines to which your workload is migrated and only then shuts down the old ones.

• The correct type of machines: this is not an exclusive tip for DigitalOcean, but they have good material to support you in choosing the correct size of machines in your cluster, which will directly affect the costs and availability of your environment.

Next steps

Just having a Kubernetes cluster is not enough. Kubernetes covers a wide range of infrastructure, including networking, storage, processing, among others. This results in a massive cognitive load and is almost impossible to master all the necessary details, especially considering that every 4 months we have a new version. Your cloud-native journey with Kubernetes is just beginning, and you will certainly come across a whole ecosystem of tools such as monitoring, centralized logs, CI/CD, and, of course, your own applications.

So do not miss our next content here on the blog, also follow Kubicast, where you can hear about experiences, case studies, and learn a lot about the cloud-native world.

See you next time with a new cloud provider!