Development Environment with Rancher Desktop/containerd, Kaniko, Private Registry, and Okteto

I'm currently working on a new development environment. I'm building it around containerization and cloud native tools. The goal is to run k3s agents at home behind a VPN. Then, whenever I am online (VPN or wifi), the k3s agents connect to my laptop running a k3s master. Suddenly, my laptop becomes much much much more powerful.

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Rancher Desktop Setup

Install Rancher Desktop. Be sure to select containerd and not (moby) for container management in Rancher Desktop preferences.

containerd

There are a lot of tools that are included with Rancher Desktop for working with containerd through CLI. One of those is nerdctl which is basically just a replacement for docker. I tried this and I ran into numerous problems. containerd isn't Docker. It's not supposed to be or we would just use that. The new approach is to leverage what containerd is good at. Find other tools to supplement what I need.

Kaniko (and buildkit-cli-for-kubectl)

These are separate things. Kaniko is its own set of tooling for building and deploying containers inside Kubernetes. This is exactly what I need. buildkit-cli-for-kubectl is exactly what it sounds like. It's buildkit as in Docker; however, it is intended to work with kubectl in a kubernetes cluster. I could make this work for me, but I would not be using containerd. I decided Kaniko is the solution more suited for what I want to do. I may still use buildkit because it does sound interesting. It offers daemon support for building with Docker which is interesting in itself. It's just outside what I want right now.

Private Registry

One of the things Docker offers that most people take for granted is the local registry that comes with the Desktop. For example, when you use docker build ., it creates a container and auto deploys to the local registry. When you type docker images, you are being shown what's currently deployed to your local registry. With containerd, you do not have this. The solution is to setup a local registry. There are a lot of options

• JFrog Artifactory
  • this is a good option because now it can be used for multiple things)
• Docker
  • Docker has a container called registry:2 that can be used

Okteto

Okteto is the icing here. It's a tool that allows using the k3s cluster for development environments by allowing environments to be deployed as pods to the cluster.