A deep dive into Cluster API and GitOps – hands-on

In this section, we’ll use Cluster API to provision a Kubernetes cluster in Azure by using the declarative approach with Argo CD on VMs.

First, let’s see what our environment looks like:

• Azure:
  • Azure tenant ID
  • Azure subscription
  • Azure app registration with Contributor access to the subscription
  • Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
  • The necessary Azure infrastructure, including Virtual Machines Scale Sets (VMSS), virtual networks, and more
• Managed cluster – AKS:
  • Argo CD running on a managed cluster
• Workload cluster – VMSS:
  • Control plane
  • Nodes
• Tools:
  • kubectl
  • clusterctl
  • az cli
  • helm

Initializing the management cluster

The clusterctl command takes a list of providers to install as input. When executed for the first time, clusterctl init automatically includes the cluster-api core provider in the list. If not specified, it also adds the kubeadm bootstrap and kubeadm control plane providers...