This guide will help you set up a Kubernetes cluster, including a service mesh using k3s (at the time of writing at version 0.10.2) and Rio. We’ll deploy the cluster on DigitalOcean. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will be OS during this tutorial. If you sign up to DigitalOcean using this link you’ll receive $50 to spend on their services over 30 days. If you wish to run your cluster on your own hardware, you could do so on Raspberry Pis (ARM64) or Intel NUCs (x86_64) for example.

Today we’ll deploy a three node Kubernetes cluster on top of Fedora 30. We’ll run the nodes on VMs in DigitalOcean’s datacenters. DigitalOcean also offers a managed Kubernetes deployment, but here we’ll deploy it manually using kubeadm. The cluster we will end up with is a single control-plane cluster, i.e. it’ll be lacking High Availability (HA) features. Using this link to DigitalOcean will grant you $50 to spend on DigitalOcean services over 30 days for free.