<\/span><\/h2>\nAt the time of writing, you have three options to choose from: You can either choose the you-don\u2019t-have-to-do-anything-at-all approach and use Microsoft\u2019s fully managed Azure Kubernetes Service. With this, you\u2019ll have your cluster up and running in less than 10 minutes. The downside is that there\u2019s not much to configure and Windows nodes are actually just a preview feature so there are additional limitations.<\/p>\n
Another option is to use the AKS Engine. AKS Engine is an open-source tool that allows you to quickly bootstrap a Kubernetes cluster on Azure (AKS Engine is also the library used by Azure Kubernetes Service, hence the name). It uses the Azure Resource Manager to deploy all the resources you specified beforehand. It also gives you more freedom to configure the cluster how you want it.<\/p>\n
The last approach would be to set it up yourself. With a normal<\/em> cluster you can just use kubeadm to both bootstrap the master node and join all your worker nodes. This is not yet possible on Windows. While you can still use kubeadm for master nodes, creating worker\u00a0nodes is a little more complicated than that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n| <\/td>\n | Do it yourself<\/span><\/td>\n | AKS<\/span><\/td>\n | AKS Engine<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| Description<\/span><\/td>\n | create VMs, deploy & configure k8s<\/span><\/td>\n | fully managed k8s<\/span><\/td>\n | AKS Engine creates ARM template to deploy on Azure<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| Customizability<\/span><\/td>\n | highest<\/span><\/td>\n | lowest<\/span><\/td>\n | medium<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| Difficulty<\/span><\/td>\n | difficult<\/span><\/td>\n | easy<\/span><\/td>\n | medium<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n SIG-Windows provides Powershell scripts that help install some of the necessary things. Then the scripts install dockerd, the process Docker uses to manage containers, and also sets up a pause image. A pause image is used to set up the initial network namespace for a pod.\u00a0After that, it installs and starts the kubelet first, then the CNI plugin (flannel), and finally the kube-proxy. It creates a Windows Service for every binary and starts said service. During the installation of the CNI plugin, it additionally calls the HNS API to create a network.<\/p>\n This is bound to get easier in the future. In fact, SIG-Windows plans to release a working kubeadm implementation in Kubernetes version 1.16.<\/p>\n | | | |