Local cluster setup

Kepler runs on Kubernetes. If you already have access to a cluster, you can skip this section. To deploy a local cluster, you can use kind. kind is a tool for running local Kubernetes clusters using Docker container "nodes". It was primarily designed for testing Kubernetes itself, but may be used for local development or CI.

Install kind

To install kind, please see the instructions here.

We need to configure our cluster to run Kepler. Specifically, we need to mount /proc (to expose information about processes running on the host) and /usr/src (to expose kernel headers allowing dynamic eBPF program compilation - this dependency might be removed in future releases into the node containers. Below is a minimal single-node example configuration:

# ./local-cluster-config.yaml
kind: Cluster
apiVersion: kind.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4
name: my-cluster
nodes:
- role: control-plane
  image: kindest/node:v1.27.3@sha256:3966ac761ae0136263ffdb6cfd4db23ef8a83cba8a463690e98317add2c9ba72
  extraMounts:
  - hostPath: /proc
    containerPath: /proc-host
  - hostPath: /usr/src
    containerPath: /usr/src

We can then spin up a cluster with either:

# export $CLUSTER_NAME="my-cluster"  # we can use the --name flag to override the name in our config
# kind create cluster --name=$CLUSTER_NAME --config=./local-cluster-config.yaml

or simply by running:

# make cluster-up

Note that kind automatically switches your current kubeconfig context to the newly created cluster.