Setup Krossboard for Google GKE clusters

On Google Compute Platform (GCP), Krossboard works as a standalone Compute Engine instance. Each instance discovers and handles GKE clusters on a per GCP project basis. This means that, once deployed within a project, the instance does automatically discover and handle all your GKE clusters belonging to that project.

This guide shows how to setup Krossboard for a given GCP project in a couple of minutes.

Before you begin

First note that Krossboard is published as ready-to-use GCP images. This release approach aims to make its deployment as simple than creating a GCP virtual machine.

This installation guide assumes that:

  • You have a basic level of practice with GCP.
  • You have a GCP account with at least an editor level of access to a project. The editor role is needed to create and configure your Krossboard instance. Krossboard itself needs read-only access to your GKE clusters.
  • You have access to a bash >=4 terminal with gcloud installed and configured to get access o your GCP project. Or, alternatively, you may use Google Cloud Shell.
  • You have kubectl installed and accessible from your terminal.

Deploy a Krossboard instance

The commands below shall deploy an instance of Krossboard in a couple of minutes.

Before launching the installation, review and set the following variables suitably:

  • The variable GCP_PROJECT sets the ID of the target project (i.e. where your GKE clusters are located).
  • The variable GCP_ZONE sets the deployment zone (default is us-central1-a).
  • The variable GCP_INSTANCE_TYPE sets the instance type (default is g1-small – what should be sufficient unless the target project holds a big number of GKE clusters along with many namespaces).
# user-provided parameters
export GCP_PROJECT="my-gke-project"
export GCP_ZONE="us-central1-a"
export GCP_INSTANCE_TYPE="g1-small" 
curl -so krossboard_gcp_install.sh \
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/2-alchemists/krossboard/master/tooling/setup/krossboard_gcp_install.sh && \
    bash ./krossboard_gcp_install.sh

If you have the following prompt:

API [compute.googleapis.com] not enabled on project [1062262466175]. 
Would you like to enable and retry (this will take a few minutes)? 
(y/N)?

Answer yes to enable Compute Engine API.

On success a summary of the installation shall be displayed as below:

=== Summary the Krossboard instance ===
Instance Name => krossboard-v20200818t1597750044-preview
Project => krossboard-demo
Krossboard UI => http://1.2.3.4/

Get access to Krossboard UI

Open a browser tab and point it to the Krossboard URL displayed at the end of the installation script. Note: It may take a few seconds before the instance finishes its initialization, during this time you may experience a loading error in the browser.

The default username and password to sign in are:

  • Username: krossboard
  • Password (default): Kr0sSB8qrdAdm

It’s highly recommended to change this default password as soon as possible.

sudo /opt/krossboard/bin/krossboard-change-passwd

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