Hi! Last weekend I finally tried out the famous Kubernetes The Hard Way by Kelsey Hightower. It's a long overdue considering how long it's been since I started learning Kubernetes, but I finally made it. Here I want to share some of the gotchas that I found while trying it out for the first time.
Gotchas
Google Cloud Quotas
Google Cloud Platform enforces quotas of cloud resources that you can use. On all my previous attempts this has been the biggest blocker because the starting quotas are 8 CPUs and 8 compute instances per region. There's no way to increase these quota except contacting sales or capping the quota for some time which isn't realistic for studying/lab purpose. Fortunately, the company I'm working on does let me use their dev GCP project to try things out. OMEGA Cool!
Google Cloud Excessive Public Firewall
Another thing to note is that when creating firewall rule to allow ssh and ICMP from the internet, GCP actively tries to patch my firewall and I had to allow them back every now and then.
Bug with Google Cloud APIs
A minor bug with Kelsey's script, REGION=$(curl -s -H "Metadata-Flavor: Google" \ http://metadata.google.internal/computeMetadata/v1/project/attributes/google-compute-default-region)
retrieved other region instead of us-west1 as set in the beginning of the lab.
IP Address Clean Up
Another minor bug where Google Cloud turns out already clean up the IP address with the instances and no longer need another command.
Lessons Learned
This is definitely a great resource for beginner to learn Kubernetes fundamental components. I also got to learn how to implement Kubernetes Networking model using Google Cloud routes. Besides that, I learned the above gotchas and some of Google Cloud undocumented (or just my ignorance) behavior / characteristic.