Create GKE Clusters

In this section, we will create GKE Clusters in our Google Cloud Shell using the gcloud CLI.

The gcloud command-line interface is the primary CLI tool to create and manage Google Cloud resources. You can use this tool to perform many common platform tasks either from the command line or in scripts and other automations.

  1. In your Google Cloud Shell, execute the following command to set an environment variable for the GCP environment project ID.
export PROJECT_ID=`gcloud config get-value project`
echo $PROJECT_ID
  1. In your Google Cloud Shell, execute the following command to set an environment variable for the GCP region and zonethat you would like to use.
export REGION=<your region>
echo $REGION

export ZONE=<your zone>
echo $ZONE
  1. Execute the following gcloud CLI commands to create 3 GKE clusters for test, stage and prod.
gcloud container clusters create testgcpworkshop --zone $ZONE --release-channel=rapid --machine-type=e2-standard-2 --image-type=COS --disk-type=pd-ssd --disk-size=10 --num-nodes=1  --enable-autoupgrade --enable-autorepair --async

gcloud container clusters create staginggcpworkshop --zone $ZONE --release-channel=rapid --machine-type=e2-standard-2 --image-type=COS --disk-type=pd-ssd --disk-size=10 --num-nodes=1  --enable-autoupgrade --enable-autorepair --async

gcloud container clusters create gcpworkshop --zone $ZONE --release-channel=rapid --machine-type=e2-standard-2 --image-type=COS --disk-type=pd-ssd --disk-size=10 --num-nodes=1  --enable-autoupgrade --enable-autorepair --async

With this command we have specified the following GKE cluster properties:

  • Specified the Kubernetes release channel which controls Kubernetes cluster version updates. Rapid gets the latest Kubernete release as early as possible.
  • Specified the Kubernetes node machine type as e2-standard-2 and set it to container optimized.
  • Set disk storage type and size (SSD).
  • Configured the number of Kubernetes worker nodes (we only need 1 for our workshop).
  • Enabled auto-upgrade.
  • Enabled auto-repair in case some part of our infrastructure fails.

It will take a few minutes to create the GKE clusters. While we wait, we can move on to set up the rest of the workshop.