Quickstart

This Quickstart guide demonstrates how to set up a new Kubernetes cluster, install the Spin Operator and deploy your first Spin application.

Prerequisites

Ensure necessary prerequisites are installed.

For this Quickstart in particular, you will need:

• kubectl - the Kubernetes CLI
• Rancher Desktop or Docker Desktop for managing containers and Kubernetes on your desktop
• k3d - a lightweight Kubernetes distribution that runs on Docker
• Helm - the package manager for Kubernetes

Set up Your Kubernetes Cluster

1. Create a Kubernetes cluster with a k3d image that includes the containerd-shim-spin prerequisite already installed:

k3d cluster create wasm-cluster \
  --image ghcr.io/spinkube/containerd-shim-spin/k3d:v0.14.1 \
  --port "8081:80@loadbalancer" \
  --agents 2

Note: Spin Operator requires a few Kubernetes resources that are installed globally to the cluster. We create these directly through kubectl as a best practice, since their lifetimes are usually managed separately from a given Spin Operator installation.

2. Install cert-manager

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.3/cert-manager.yaml

3. Apply the Runtime Class used for scheduling Spin apps onto nodes running the shim:

Note: In a production cluster you likely want to customize the Runtime Class with a nodeSelector that matches nodes that have the shim installed. However, in the K3d example, they’re installed on every node.

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/spinkube/spin-operator/releases/download/v0.1.0/spin-operator.runtime-class.yaml

4. Apply the Custom Resource Definitions used by the Spin Operator:

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/spinkube/spin-operator/releases/download/v0.1.0/spin-operator.crds.yaml

Deploy the Spin Operator

Execute the following command to install the Spin Operator on the K3d cluster using Helm. This will create all of the Kubernetes resources required by Spin Operator under the Kubernetes namespace spin-operator. It may take a moment for the installation to complete as dependencies are installed and pods are spinning up.

# Install Spin Operator with Helm
helm install spin-operator \
  --namespace spin-operator \
  --create-namespace \
  --version 0.1.0 \
  --wait \
  oci://ghcr.io/spinkube/charts/spin-operator

Lastly, create the shim executor:

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/spinkube/spin-operator/releases/download/v0.1.0/spin-operator.shim-executor.yaml

Run the Sample Application

You are now ready to deploy Spin applications onto the cluster!

1. Create your first application in the same spin-operator namespace that the operator is running:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spinkube/spin-operator/main/config/samples/simple.yaml

2. Forward a local port to the application pod so that it can be reached:

kubectl port-forward svc/simple-spinapp 8083:80

3. In a different terminal window, make a request to the application:

curl localhost:8083/hello

You should see:

Hello world from Spin!

Next Steps

Congrats on deploying your first SpinApp! Recommended next steps:

• Scale your Spin Apps with Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA)
• Scale your Spin Apps with Kubernetes Event Driven Autoscaler (KEDA)