This post is the second, in a series that will consider the topic of predictive auto-scaling of vSphere VMs and containerized services. The purpose of this post is to describe how to build the first components with the installation and configuration of Docker and Kubernetes on VMs. I will be using Docker 1.13, Kubernetes 1.10, and CentOS 7 x64 for the implementation.

You will need either a vSphere environment or VMware Workstation/Fusion, CentOS install media, and an internet connection. There are a handful of ways to implement a test-bed Kubernetes cluster. Running on a cloud provider CaaS platform, orchestrating as a Docker-in-Docker deployment, building manually from scratch, or building with a helper tool from scratch. Continue reading →