Installing Kubeapps on IBM Cloud

Abhishek Dingar

4 min readFeb 18, 2021

Step 1 — Provision Kubernetes Cluster

Click the Catalog button on the top
Select Service from the Catalog
Search for Kubernetes Service and click on it

You are now at the Kubernetes deployment page. You need to specify some details about the cluster
Choose a plan standard or free, the free plan only has one worker node and no subnet, to provide a standard cluster, you will need to upgrade your account to Pay-As-You-Go
To upgrade to a Pay-As-You-Go account, complete the following steps:
In the console, go to Manage > Account.
Select Account settings, and click Add credit card.
Enter your payment information, click Next, and submit your information
Choose classic or VPC, read the docs and choose the most suitable type for yourself

Now choose your location settings,
Choose Geography (continent)

Choose Single or Multizone.

In single zone, your data is only kept on the datacenter while on the other hand with Multizone, it is distributed to multiple zones, thus safer in an unforeseen zone failure
If you wish to use Multizone, please set up your account with VRF

If at your current location selection, there is no available Virtual LAN, a new VLAN will be created for you
Choose a Worker node setup or use the preselected one. Set Worker node amount per zone
Choose Master Service Endpoint.

In VRF-enabled accounts, you can choose private-only to make your master accessible on the private network or via VPN tunnel. Choose public-only to make your master publicly accessible. When you have a VRF-enabled account, your cluster is set up by default to use both private and public endpoints.

Give desired tags to your cluster, click create
Wait for your cluster to be provisioned
Your cluster is ready for usage

Step 2 — Deploy IBM Cloud Block Storage plug-in

The Block Storage plug-in is a persistent, high-performance iSCSI storage that you can add to your apps by using Kubernetes Persistent Volumes (PVs).

Click the Catalog button on the top
Select Software from the catalog
Search for IBM Cloud Block Storage plug-in and click on it
On the application page Click on the dot next to the cluster, you wish to use
Click on Enter or Select Namespace and choose the default Namespace or use a custom one (if you get an error please wait for about 30 minutes for the cluster to finalize)
Give a name to this workspace
Click install and wait for the deployment

Step 3 — Installing Kubeapps on IBM Cloud

Use the Helm chart to install the latest version of Kubeapps:

helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
kubectl create namespace kubeapps
helm install kubeapps --namespace kubeapps bitnami/kubeapps

The above commands will deploy Kubeapps into the kubeapps namespace in your cluster. It may take a few minutes to execute.

You can check the status of the deployment using the command below:

kubectl get pods -w --namespace kubeapps

Once it has been deployed and the Kubeapps pods are running, continue to another step.

Create a demo credential with which to access Kubeapps and Kubernetes

You can create a Kubernetes service account and use the API token to authenticate with the Kubernetes API server via Kubeapps:

kubectl create serviceaccount kubeapps-operator
kubectl create clusterrolebinding kubeapps-operator \
   --clusterrole=cluster-admin \
   --serviceaccount=default:kubeapps-operator

Start the Kubeapps Dashboard

Once Kubeapps is installed, securely access the Kubeapps Dashboard from your system by running:

kubectl port-forward -n kubeapps svc/kubeapps 8080:80

Deploy an application with Kubeapps

Once you have the Kubeapps Dashboard up and running, you can start deploying applications into your cluster.

Start with the Dashboard welcome page
Use the “Catalog” menu to select an application from the list of available charts
Click the “Deploy” button
You can customize the deployment by editing the form or YAML configuration file. Click “Deploy” to proceed
The application will now be deployed. You will be able to track the new Kubernetes deployment directly from the browser

Installation is Done, Enjoy!!