Building an On-Premise Kubernetes Cluster — Part 2: Installing Containerd and Kubernetes

🇧🇷 Leia a versão em português aqui In Part 1 of this series, we prepared the environment: defined the hardware, configured /etc/hosts , adjusted the firewall, and disabled SWAP on all nodes. Now that the foundation is ready, it's time to install the container runtime ( containerd ) and the Kubernetes packages themselves ( kubelet and kubeadm ). All the steps below should be run on all servers in the cluster — master and workers — unless stated otherwise. Loading kernel modules Kubernetes, through containerd, depends on two Linux kernel modules: overlay (for the layered filesystem used by containers) and br_netfilter (so that bridge network traffic passes through iptables rules). For these modules to load automatically on every boot, create the file /etc/modules-load.d/containerd.conf : overlay br_netfilter And, to load them immediately (without needing a reboot), run: $ sudo modprobe overlay $ sudo modprobe br_netfilter Adjusting kernel network parameters Create the file /etc/sysctl.d/99-kubernetes-k8s.conf with the following parameters: net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables = 1 net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1 net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 1 These parameters ensure that network traffic between pods and services is correctly routed and filtered by Kubernetes. To apply the settings without restarting the server: $ sudo sysctl --system Installing containerd Containerd is the container runtime used by the cluster. In this case, we'll install it through Docker's official repository, using only the containerd.io package (without installing full Docker). 1. Download the repository's GPG key: curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/docker.gpg 2. Create the repository file at /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list : deb [ arch = amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/debian bullseye stable 3. Update the package list and install containerd: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install containerd.io 4. Generate the default