kina 1.1.1

A simple tool to create ephemeral AKS Clusters

Kina - Kubernetes in Azure

Inspired by kind, Kina aims to spawn Kubernetes clusters in Azure and add them to your local kubectl config with minimal fuss.

[!WARNING] These clusters are not suitable for production workloads and have several developer features enabled by default.

Installation

Kina is managed via uv. While tools like pip or pipx may work, only uv is officially supported.

$ uv tool install kina

If this is your first time using uv, make sure it's tools directory is in your PATH, e.g. ~/.local/bin.

Usage

Create an AKS Cluster

[!TIP] Kina reads your ~/.azure/azureProfile.json for configuration, specifically using the currently active Subscription ID as the base for resource creation.

$ kina create

This creates a Kubernetes cluster in uksouth using the latest version and sensible defaults for local development. You can override the location with the --location flag:

Create Multiple VNet-Peered AKS Clusters

To test multi-cluster service meshes (e.g. Linkerd, Istio) or eBPF-based solutions like Cilium, you can spawn multiple VNet-peered clusters:

$ kina create --locations="uksouth,ukwest,northeurope,westeurope"

Kina assigns IP ranges as follows:

• Virtual Network CIDR: 10.0.0.0/16
• Pod CIDR: 10.1.0.0/16
• Service CIDR: 10.2.0.0/16

Subsequent locations increment accordingly:

• Virtual Network CIDR: 10.3.0.0/16
• Pod CIDR: 10.4.0.0/16
• Service CIDR: 10.5.0.0/16

And so on.

Listing Kina Instances

List your Kina clusters with: $ kina list

You can specify output formats using --output, e.g. table, json, or names.

$ kina list
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Name        ┃ Location(s) ┃ Created By                      ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ kina-1eoyoe │ uksouth     │ [e-mail] │
└─────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────────────────────────┘

$ kina list -o json
[
  {
    "name": "kina-1eoyoe",
    "locations": "uksouth",
    "created_by": "[e-mail]"
  }
]

$ kina list -o names
kina-1eoyoe

FAQs

Q: Sometimes I get a DNS lookup failure, e.g. Unable to connect to the server: dial tcp: lookup kina-277rtg-uksouth-ey6vbz58.hcp.uksouth.azmk8s.io: no such host:

A: Because we create the AKS Clusters asynchronously, sometimes we've actually configured kubectl before Microsoft has published a DNS record for the cluster. Wait a few minutes and try again.

Q: How can I setup cilium clustermesh using this?

A: Simply install Cilium on two or more clusters you create with this tool, e.g.:

On Cluster 1: $ cilium install --version 1.17.2 --set azure.resourceGroup="<resource group name>" --set cluster.id=1 --set ipam.operator.clusterPoolIPv4PodCIDRList="{10.1.0.0/16}" then enable clustermesh with $ cilium clustermesh enable --context "<cluster name>"

On Cluster 2: $ cilium install --version 1.17.2 --set azure.resourceGroup="<resource group name" --set cluster.id=2 --set ipam.operator.clusterPoolIPv4PodCIDRList="{10.4.0.0/16}" then enable clustermesh with $ cilium clustermesh enable --context "<cluster name>"

Now you're ready to enable clustermesh between these clusters, cilium clustermesh connect --context "<cluster 1>" --destination-context "<cluster 2>"

Finally, run a connection test: $ cilium connectivity test --context "<cluster 1>" --multi-cluster "<cluster 2>"

Q: Why wouldn't this tool just use the Cilium Dataplane that AKS ships with?

A: Microsoft's distribution of Cilium does not support Clustermesh.