When I learned that the ACM was going to drop Pluralsight support, I decided I should finish up some of the courses I was taking. One of those was a basic Kubernetes course that I wanted to use as a refresher. I often go back to entry-level documentation so that I can reinforce my understanding of the basics.

I realized that I’d need a k8s cluster for the projects in the course. I don’t have enough hardware laying around any longer to build something and I didn’t want to mess with minikube etc. I decided I’d use my Linode account to spin up clusters on demand as I worked on the course.

Building things manually is typically a pain so I took a swing at it with OpenTofu. I use Terraform and OpenTofu daily but I haven’t used the Linode provider yet. It turned out to be a lot nicer than I expected.

Using the LKE Cluster docs, I quickly put together this simple configuration in order to create an LKE cluster with the smallest Linodes available:

terraform {
  required_providers {
    linode = {
      source  = "linode/linode"
      version = "~> 2.0"
    }
  }
}

provider "linode" {
  token = var.linode_token
}

variable "linode_token" {
  description = "Linode API token"
  type        = string
  sensitive   = true
}

resource "linode_lke_cluster" "smol_cluster" {
  label       = "smol-lke-cluster"
  k8s_version = "1.33"
  region      = "us-southeast"
  tags        = ["terraform"]

  pool {
    type  = "g6-standard-1"
    count = 3
  }
}

output "kubeconfig" {
  value     = linode_lke_cluster.smol_cluster.kubeconfig
  sensitive = true
}

output "api_endpoints" {
  value = linode_lke_cluster.smol_cluster.api_endpoints
}

output "status" {
  value = linode_lke_cluster.smol_cluster.status
}

I have a lot of little configuration snippets laying around. I’m going to try to consolidate them with this one here in my Devoops Junk Drawer as I remember to.