Container Runtime

Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform and therefore requires some container runtime to be installed.

This is a simple step; containerd is well-supported, well-regarded, and I don't have any reason not to use it.

I used Jeff Geerling's Ansible role to install and configure containerd on my cluster; this is really the point at which some kind of IaC/configuration management system becomes something more than a polite suggestion 🙂

That said, the actual steps are not very demanding (aside from the fact that they will need to be executed once on each Kubernetes host). They intersect largely with Docker Engine's installation instructions (since Docker, not the Containerd project, maintains the package repository), which I won't repeat here.

The container runtime installation is handled in my install_k8s_packages.yaml playbook, which is where we'll be spending some time in subsequent sections.