Kubernetes On-Premises — Self-Managed Clusters
Kubernetes On-Premises Tutorial
Welcome to the Kubernetes On-Premises tutorial track. This advanced series covers building and managing self-hosted Kubernetes clusters in your own data center or private infrastructure.
Why On-Premises Kubernetes?
While managed Kubernetes services (EKS, AKS, GKE) simplify operations, many organizations run on-premises Kubernetes for:
- Data sovereignty — Regulatory requirements that mandate data stays on-premise
- Cost control — Utilizing existing hardware investments
- Low latency — Edge computing and proximity to on-site systems
- Air-gapped environments — Disconnected networks with no cloud access
- Full control — Complete ownership of the entire stack
What You’ll Learn
| Area | Topics |
|---|---|
| Cluster Bootstrap | kubeadm, kubespray, k3s, RKE2 installation methods |
| High Availability | Multi-master control planes, etcd clustering, HAProxy/keepalived |
| Networking | Calico, Cilium, Flannel — choosing a CNI for on-prem |
| Load Balancing | MetalLB, kube-vip — bare-metal load balancer solutions |
| Storage | Longhorn, Rook-Ceph, NFS, local-path provisioner |
| Ingress | NGINX Ingress, Traefik, HAProxy Ingress for bare-metal |
| Certificate Management | cert-manager with internal CA, Let’s Encrypt, Vault PKI |
| Upgrades | Rolling control plane upgrades, node drain strategies, etcd backup/restore |
| Monitoring | Prometheus stack, Grafana, Alertmanager on-prem deployment |
| Air-Gapped | Private registries, offline installation, image mirroring |
On-Premises Key Challenges
| Challenge | Solution |
|---|---|
| No cloud load balancer | MetalLB or kube-vip for LoadBalancer Services |
| No managed control plane | kubeadm HA setup with stacked or external etcd |
| No cloud storage | Rook-Ceph, Longhorn, or NFS for persistent volumes |
| Version upgrades | Manual kubeadm upgrade process with rolling strategy |
| Certificate rotation | cert-manager with internal CA or Vault |
| DNS | CoreDNS + external-dns with internal DNS servers |
Prerequisites
Before starting this track, you should have:
- Completed the Kubernetes Foundation Tutorial and ideally the CKA Tutorial
- Access to at least 3 Linux machines (physical or VMs) with 4 GB+ RAM each
- Basic Linux system administration skills (networking, systemd, firewall)
- Familiarity with networking concepts (IP addressing, DNS, load balancing)
Chapters
| # | Chapter | Topics |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction | Why on-premises, use cases, planning |
| 2 | Infrastructure Planning | Hardware, OS, networking prerequisites |
| 3 | kubeadm Installation | Multi-node cluster setup with kubeadm |
| 4 | Networking (CNI) | Calico, Flannel, Cilium comparison & setup |
| 5 | Storage | NFS, Ceph, Longhorn, local-path-provisioner |
| 6 | HA Control Plane | Stacked etcd, external etcd, load balancer setup |
| 7 | Monitoring & Logging | Prometheus + Grafana stack, EFK/Loki |
| 8 | Backup & Disaster Recovery | etcd backup, Velero, cluster recovery |
