The Jetson Nano is an easily accessible, yet powerful single board computer built to deploy machine learning applications and more. Kubernetes is the most popular orchestration system used to manage and automate your application deployment, through a Kubernetes Cluster. K3s is the more lightweight version of Kubernetes.

This week we look at setting up a Kubernetes cluster on two Jetson Nanos, although you can do it with as many worker nanos as you’d like. It can be tricky to do, especially with no guide that outlines how to do it specifically for the Jetson Nano’s unique architecture. Although there are many other guides out there, this one is specifically for the Nano and will address any specific issues that come with that.

What We Will Use:

• 2 fresh Jetson Nanos running Ubuntu 18.04, with Jetpack SDK 4.5 installed.

Preliminary Steps:

The first thing we need to decide is which jetson will be our master node, and which one(s) will be our worker nodes. The master node is the nano that you will deploy the cluster from, and the worker node(s) will join the cluster. Name them accordingly. I have named mine master and node1.

Then, use SSH to work on all the Nanos easily. Use this:

ssh user@ <target ip address>

And then login as you normally would on the nano you are SSHing into.

We will need curl for this, so Use this to install curl on all nanos.

sudo apt-get install curl

To make things easier, I recommend running “sudo su” to avoid having to type sudo before everything.

1. Installing Master Node:

We will now configure the Master Node. On your master nano only, run:

curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -s - --no-deploy traefik --write-kubeconfig-mode 644 --node-name k3s-master-01

 This installs k3s and starts it, deploys a cluster, and sets this node as the master.

You can view that your master node is online by running:

kubectl get nodes

You should see your “k3s-master-01” node is the only one in the cluster.

For the next step, which is installing the worker nodes, we will need the master node’s token. To get it, run this:

cat /var/lib/rancher/k3s/server/node-token

And copy the token for the next step.

2. Installing Worker Node(s):

We will now configure the Worker Nodes. Do this on all the worker nodes you have.

curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | K3S_NODE_NAME=k3s-worker-01 K3S_URL=https://<IP>:6443 K3S_TOKEN=<TOKEN> sh -

Replace <IP> and <TOKEN> with the master node’s ip address (you can get this by running ifconfig) and the token you previously saved.

Now, when you run “kubectl get nodes” on the master node, you can see that the worker has joined.

3. Bringing up the dashboard

At this step, you’re pretty much done, your cluster is up, and you can begin deploying containers. I will show you now how to bring up the dashboard to view all your containers once they are deployed.

First, run this on the master node. This will deploy the kubernetes dashboard.

GITHUB_URL=https://github.com/kubernetes/dashboard/releases VERSION_KUBE_DASHBOARD=$(curl -w '%{url_effective}' -I -L -s -S ${GITHUB_URL}/latest -o /dev/null | sed -e 's|.*/||') sudo k3s kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/dashboard/${VERSION_KUBE_DASHBOARD}/aio/deploy/recommended.yaml

Now we have to create a few files:

• Dashboard.admin-user.yml (do vim dashboard.admin-user.yml), press i to enter insert mode, and paste the following.

apiVersion: v1 kind: ServiceAccount metadata:   name: admin-user   namespace: kubernetes-dashboard

Press esc then :x to exit the vim editor and save.

• Dashboard.admin-user-role.yml (do vim dashboard.admin-user-role.yml), press i to enter insert mode, and paste the following.

apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1 kind: ClusterRoleBinding metadata:   name: admin-user roleRef:   apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io   kind: ClusterRole   name: cluster-admin subjects: - kind: ServiceAccount   name: admin-user   namespace: kubernetes-dashboard

Save the file the same way as the previous one.

Now we will deploy the admin-user configuration. Run:

k3s kubectl create -f dashboard.admin-user.yml -f dashboard.admin-user-role.yml

Now we will access the token needed to access the dashboard locally in a web browser. Run:

k3s kubectl -n kubernetes-dashboard describe secret admin-user-token | grep '^token'

And keep note of the very long token.

Now we will create a secure channel to the cluster. To do this, run:

k3s kubectl proxy

You should see:

Starting to serve on 127.0.0.1:8001

This means that the dashboard is being served at 127.0.0.1, on port 8001. At this link you will find your dashboard:

http://localhost:8001/api/v1/namespaces/kubernetes-dashboard/services/https:kubernetes-dashboard:/proxy/

It will prompt you for the token we copied in the previous step. Paste it here, and you will have access to the kubernetes dashboard.

And you’re done! Once you deploy containerized apps, you will be able to see and manage them in the dashboard.

Other useful commands

To shut off your cluster, run:

k3s-killall.sh

To delete your dashboard, run:

sudo k3s kubectl delete ns kubernetes-dashboard sudo k3s kubectl delete clusterrolebinding kubernetes-dashboard sudo k3s kubectl delete clusterrole kubernetes-dashboard

To restart the cluster later, run:

sudo systemctl restart k3s

In next week’s blog post, we will look at containerizing apps and deploying them. We will also look at managing them between nodes, and using the dashboard more.