Mirantis Container Cloud Trial
Detailed Instructions
Signup and Login
Create and verify an account.
Select the “Sign Up” tab
Complete the form to create a Mirantis user account.
You will receive an email from Mirantis with a link to validate your email address, which is also your user name.
After verifying your email, click the same button and log into your account.
A browser window will open where you can start your trial by clicking on LAUNCH TRIAL ENVIRONMENT.
Create a Kubernetes cluster
Click on the Create Cluster button at the top right corner of the interface.
Name your cluster, here we used my-mirantis-container-cloud-cluster, select trial as the Provider Credential, and click Create.
Start Manager and Worker Nodes
Since our provider is AWS, we must also select a region on the "Provider" page before being able to create the cluster.
For the purpose of this demo, we will create 3 Manager and 2 Worker nodes. Manager nodes are responsible for cluster management functionality and dispatching tasks to worker nodes. Having multiple manager nodes allows your cluster to be highly-available and tolerate node failures. Worker nodes receive and execute your services and applications. Having multiple worker nodes allows you to scale the computing capacity of your cluster.
Click on your cluster.
Click on Create Machine.
Enter 3 for the Count of machines, select Manager as a type, select the available instance type, select the available AMI ID, and click “Create”.
Repeat the operation with Worker nodes, enter 2 as a Count.
While you wait for the cluster to provision
It will take between 20 to 30 minutes for the cluster to provision the nodes. You can monitor the progress by hovering over the cluster status column. This will provide you with a detailed description of what is happening in the background.
The next step will involve using, Lens, and kubectl to interact with the cluster. If not installed, let’s proceed to the next step while the cluster provision the nodes.
Install Lens and the Mirantis Container Cloud Lens extension
To install Lens, go on the Lens website and download the binary. Lens is compatible with Mac OS, Windows, and Linux.
Once Lens is installed, launch it and switch to the Extension view by going to File (or Lens on macOS) > Extensions
Enter @mirantis/lens-extension-cc in the Name field and press Install.
Use Lens to explore your Kubernetes cluster
Once your cluster is ready, you can use Lens to explore your Kubernetes cluster.
The Mirantis Container Cloud Lens Extension works by connecting to a management cluster and periodically syncing its visible clusters, credentials, SSH keys, proxies, and RHEL licenses into the Lens Catalog. From there, you can further explore these items with Lens's introspection tools.
Click on the Mirantis Container Cloud button in the top bar, on the right side, to activate the extension.
When there are no management clusters, you'll see the Welcome screen, as above. Click on the button at the bottom.
In the first field, enter a friendly name of your choice (no spaces or special characters allowed) for the management cluster you will connect to. This name will be used in Catalog labels to identify resources belonging to this management cluster in order to help with searching/filtering.
In the second field, enter the URL to the management cluster itself.
When you click on Connect, your default browser will open to the management cluster's sign in screen.
If the browser you used to start the trial is not your default browser, you will need to sign in using your default browser. Click on "Sign in with Trial Auth" at the bottom, and sign in. Otherwise, the sign in process should be automatic.
You should then be redirected to Lens via a confirmation dialog like this (in your browser):
Be sure to allow the redirect. Otherwise, the extension will fail to connect to the management cluster. If the browser window remains open, you can safely close it manually.
In a few seconds, the extension will list all the projects it discovered in the management cluster. Select the same project in which you created the cluster in the previous steps and click on "Synchronize selected projects" at the bottom.
After adding a new management cluster, you'll be shown the Sync View. As highlighted, the Name column on the far left shows the short name for the management cluster, along with all synced projects. Under each project, you'll find the number of resources that have been synced to Lens and are available in the Catalog. You should see that 1 cluster and 1 credential were synced. (If the cluster count is 0, this is most likely because the cluster wasn't quite ready when the sync took place. We will fix this shortly.)
Use the blue button at the top left of the Lens window to switch to the Lens Catalog view.
The Catalog should be already set to the Cluster category where a single cluster (your trial) should be available.
If your trial cluster is not in the list, it's most likely because it wasn't ready when the last sync took place. Synchronization takes place automatically every 5 minutes. If the cluster's status is "ready" in Mirantis Container Cloud, use the extension's "Sync now" feature by clicking on the extension's button in Lens (top right corner of the window).
The synchronization status will change from "Connected" to "Updating" and back to "Connected". Switch back to the Lens Catalog to see your cluster.
From the Catalog, you can click on the cluster to see your overall cluster resources consumption.
Note that since Lens requires special credentials to access clusters and introspect them, your default browser window will open again, and you may need to sign into the management cluster again. Once Lens has the special credentials, this shouldn't be necessary again until they expire.
Lens will then show you all the details about your cluster.
By clicking on Nodes in the left menu, you can see the list of nodes with their resource consumption, version, age, and condition.
You can access more details by clicking on the three-dots icon for a specific node.
The top blue bar offers to perform a number of actions including obtaining a shell for the node.
Use kubectl to explore your Kubernetes cluster via CLI
If not already installed, follow kubectl documentation to install it on your local machine.
Click on the cluster 3-dots icon and click on Download KubeConfig and click the Download button.
Create a KUBECONFIG environment variable by typing this command in your terminal. Make sure to replace the path to match your cluster name and file path.
export KUBECONFIG=~/Downloads/my-mirantis-container-cloud-cluster.yml
To see your cluster status, enter the following command in your terminal. kubectl get nodes -o wide
Wrapping Up
If you would like to learn more about what’s possible with Mirantis Container Cloud please select from the following;
Docs – docs.mirantis.com
Overview – www.mirantis.com
