Installing Kubernetes

Kubernetes can be installed on most cloud services or locally on your own hardware or virtual machines. Unsurprisingly, since Kubernetes is a Google project, it runs best on GCE and new features tend to be supported there first.

In addition, Google has rolled out a service called Google Container Engine (GKE), which is a pre-rolled Kubernetes service. Google maintains the Kubernetes master and makes it easy to add new nodes to the cluster. You only need to worry about the containers. This is the easiest way to get started with Kubernetes.

For local installations, there are several options. The first is the new kubeadm tool which was released as a beta tool with Kubernetes 1.4. Second, there is the kube-up.sh script which is part of the Kubernetes release package which can install Kubernetes on a variety of platforms.

There are two other options worth considering. RHEL has a kubernetes package available which is installable with yum. The Rancher container management suite...