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Introduction and Setup

This tutorial introduces you to the Replicated features for software vendors and their enterprise users. It is designed to familiarize you with the key concepts and processes that you use as a software vendor when you package and distribute your application with Replicated.

In this tutorial, you use a set of sample manifest files for a basic NGINX application to learn how to:

  • Create and promote releases for an application as a software vendor
  • Install and update an application on a Kubernetes cluster as an enterprise user

The steps in this KOTS UI-based tutorial show you how to use the Replicated vendor portal to perform these tasks. The vendor portal is the user interface that you use as a software vendor to create, configure, and manage your application artifacts, including application releases, release channels, customer entitlements, private image registries, and more.

For a tutorial that demonstrates how to use the replicated CLI to create and promote releases for your application, see CLI Tutorial.

note

This tutorial assumes that you have a working knowledge of Kubernetes. For an introduction to Kubernetes and free training resources, see Training in the Kubernetes documentation.

Set Up the Environment​

As part of this tutorial, you install a sample application into an existing Kubernetes cluster or into an embedded cluster provisioned by Replicated kURL. kURL creates the cluster on an existing virtual machine (VM).

Before you begin this tutorial, ensure that you have one of the following environments set up:

  • A Kubernetes cluster that you can access with the kubectl command-line tool. Your cluster must meet the minimum system requirements described in Existing Cluster Requirements in Installation Requirements.

    You can use any cloud provider or tool that you prefer to create a cluster, such as Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Amazon Web Services (AWS), or minikube.

    Example:

    For example, to create a cluster in GKE, run the following command in the gcloud CLI:

    gcloud container clusters create NAME --preemptible --no-enable-ip-alias

    Replace NAME with any name you want to use for the cluster.

    For information about installing and configuring the kubectl command-line tool, see Install Tools and Command line tool (kubectl) in the Kubernetes documentation.

  • A VM where kURL can create a cluster. The kURL script installs and configures the kubectl command-line tool for you.

    For this tutorial, the VM must meet the following requirements:

    • Ubuntu 18.04
    • At least 8 GB of RAM
    • 4 CPU cores
    • At least 50GB of disk space
    note

    If you use a virtual machine that is behind a firewall, make sure that port 8800 (and any other ports you attempt to access through the internet) are allowed to accept traffic. GCP and AWS typically require firewall rule creation to expose ports.

    For the complete list of system requirements for the kURL, see kURL Requirements in Installation Requirements.

For more information about the subjects in the getting started tutorials, see the following topics: