Connect Roost Desktop with a Remote Cluster

Owned by Harish Agrawal, created
Last updated: Mar 03, 2021
2 min read

Description

This article details how to use Roost Desktop with an existing Kubernetes Cluster. The cluster could be running on any kind of compute instance. The below does not deal with connecting to Managed Kubernetes Offering such as EKS, GKE, AKS.

Purpose

Often we would like to avail the benefit of Roost Desktop while working with an existing cluster. This cluster could be on a remote machine, due to resource availability reasons OR because it is a shared team cluster. What ever be the reason, if you have a need to connect to a cluster other than the one running locally, then this article is for you.

Prerequisite

  • User should have access to the cluster nodes (running Linux OS).

  • User should be able to launch additional process as root or ubuntu

  • The control-plane or master node should allow TCP access on ports 22, 6443 and 60001

  • User should have the latest Roost Desktop downloaded and installed.

How to enable/access it?

  • Engage with Roost Support to get a ROOST_USER assigned to you.

  • SSH to the Cluster master node and execute this command with appropriate values

  • EMAIL can be any valid email, preferably yours and ROOST_TOKEN can be any unique string (lowercase) to identify this cluster. KUBECONFIG needs to be set to the absolute path of the Kubernetes config file (typically found under /etc/kubernetes/admin.conf or $HOME/.kube/config).

    export EMAIL="****" ROOST_USER="PROVIDED_BY_ROOST" ROOST_TOKEN="****" KUBECONFIG="<path to config file>"; curl https://remote-roost.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/remote-roost.sh| bash

 

After the above has been executed on the cluster node, launch or go to the Roost Desktop,

  • Click on Menu Cluster, option K8s Cluster and Choice “Add Remote Roost”

  • Provide in the pop-up menu, the EMAIL and ROOST_TOKEN as Identity. Alias can be modified or left as the default suggested value.

  • On click of “Validate”, Roost Desktop will attempt to establish a connection with the “Remote Cluster”

Roadmap

Current support is available for single node cluster only. Plan to allow multi-node cluster connections in April 2021.