Have you ever wondered about having a local Sitecore instance on a local deployment of k8s?
I was curious and decided to dive headfirst into the unknown world of k8s virtualization on a local setup. In this blog series I will be sharing the details my journey, my findings the mistakes/successes, and the final state of my discovery.

The Idea

Having experience with developing/deploying Sitecore with Docker Containers, I was curious as to the possibility of doing the same using Kubernetes. So the idea was have a POC of a local environment on my Windows 10/11 PC, with full blown Kubernetes, running Sitecore.

The Research

So my research took me to various tools, from Minikube, Kind to the recently released AKS Edge Essentials Preview from Microsoft TechCommunity. I will go through each and briefly discuss them

–Minikube

Minikube seemed a likely solution, as it offered running k8s on a windows pc. The setup was a bit involved and I had to research a fair bit on running kubectl commands to get my cluster up and individual Pods running.
However, the limitations of not being able to run mixed PODs of Linux and Windows, cancelled it as an option. The Sitecore CMS is a ASP.NET application and would need a windows node to operate.

–Kind

Similar to Minikube, Kind offers to spin up local kubernetes cluster on a windows pc. However, the setup and pre-requisites were just too overwhelming for a simple POC. Also getting a windows node in operation was not a straight forward thing. If anyone else is up for the challenge, I’d be interested in your approach

–AKS Edge Essentials

I was almost at the point of calling it a day in my pursuit, when a quick google search lead me to a publication from the Microsoft TechCommunity on a preview of Azure Kubernetes Service Edge Essentials (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/internet-of-things-blog/taking-azure-arc-and-kubernetes-to-the-edge/ba-p/3650599?WT.mc_id=modinfra-0000-thmaure) or Project Haven as introduced during build 2022. Reading through the article, I picked up on the products ability to:
Run both Linux and Windows container applications
Light-weight Kubernetes distribution-both K3s and K8s
Deployable on any Windows PC class device with windows 10/11 Enterprise and Pro.
It was then I realized I had found my answer.
I reached out to the project team to give me early access to the preview to start building out my solution. It took a few weeks, but I got back a reply and was given access to the public preview and started building out my POC.
In my next blog (The Solution) I will go through the build process and challenges I faced such as:
What version of Sitecore I decided to use
Hardware requirements
What K8s configurations I used and modified
How easy it was to spin-up the deployment
In the meantime feel free to check out the project Github repo here.