Using kind for development purposes and CI

Why use kind

Fast Setup: Launch a multi-node Kubernetes cluster locally in under a minute.
Quick Teardown: Dismantle the cluster in just a few seconds, streamlining your development workflow.
Local Image Usage: Deploy your container images directly without the need to push to a remote registry.
Lightweight and Efficient: Kind is a minimalistic Kubernetes distribution, making it perfect for local development and CI/CD pipelines.

This only cover the basics to use a kind cluster. You can find more details at kind documentation.

Installation

Follow the kind installation instructions to install kind.

Create a cluster

You can simply create a kind cluster by

kind create cluster

To customize your cluster, you can provide additional configuration. For example, the following is a sample kind configuration.

kind: Cluster
apiVersion: kind.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4
nodes:
  - role: control-plane
  - role: worker
  - role: worker
  - role: worker

Using the configuration above, run the following command will give you a k8s v1.17.2 cluster with 1 control-plane node and 3 worker nodes.

kind create cluster --config hack/kind-config.yaml --image=kindest/node:v1.17.2

You can use the --image flag to specify the cluster version you want, e.g. --image=kindest/node:v1.17.2. See the kind node images for supported versions.

Load docker image into the cluster

When developing with a local kind cluster, loading docker images to the cluster is a very useful feature. You can avoid using a container registry.

kind load docker-image your-image-name:your-tag

See Load a local image into a kind cluster for more information.

Delete a cluster