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Onboard a Cluster

Once you have downloaded and configured tctl, the next step is to onboard a new workload cluster to your TSB installation. You can then deploy applications and services to that cluster, and use TSB to manage the security, traffic management and observability for those applications.

tip

The onboard-cluster.sh script is a helper for users of the Hosted TSB management plane. You can also download the TSB software images, install them and configure your cluster manually, using the following instructions:

Before You Begin​

Before you begin, ensure that you have the following tools available and configured to manage your workload cluster:

  • kubectl
  • helm

Select a name for your cluster, such as cluster-1. This name will be used in the TSB configuration to refer to resources on that cluster.

Cluster Prerequisites​

Before onboarding a cluster, you may wish to install some prerequisites. These are not strictly required, but will make it simpler to manage services on that cluster:

Your workload cluster will send metrics and traces to your hosted Tetrate Management Plane. The location of your management plane (AWS region) is shared in your welcome email.

The egress costs you may incur with cross-region traffic can be high. For high-volume testing and for production usage, it's more cost-effective to establish a PrivateLink connection to reduce these costs. Please contact Tetrate support to establish this.

AWS Load Balancer Controller​

Tetrate recommends installing AWS Load Balancer Controller on each workload cluster.

For more background information, check out the Amazon resource Network load balancing on Amazon EKS.

Onboard the Cluster​

  1. Download the Helper Script​

    curl -sLO https://charts.dl.tetrate.io/public/raw/files/onboard-cluster.sh

  2. Onboard the cluster​

    Chose a cluster name, such as cluster-1. Your default kubectl context should point to the cluster you intend to onboard:

    bash ./onboard-cluster.sh cluster-1

    Expect to see output resembling the following:

    [INFO] Starting Tetrate cluster onboarding for: cluster-1
    [SUCCESS] Prerequisites check passed
    [SUCCESS] Cluster service account registered
    [SUCCESS] Configuration template generated
    [SUCCESS] Configuration patches applied
    [SUCCESS] Helm repository updated
    [SUCCESS] Tetrate Control Plane installed
    [SUCCESS] Tetrate Hosted Agent installed
    [SUCCESS] Tetrate cluster onboarding completed for 'cluster-1'

  3. Check the status​

    The cluster will take several minutes to onboard and then start syncing status.

    You can view the installation progress by following the logs from the tsb-operator:

    kubectl logs -f -n istio-system -l name=tsb-operator

    Once the control plane software is installed, you can view the onboarding status with the following tctl command:

    tctl get cluster

    Your cluster status can also be viewed in the TSB UI:

    Cluster Status

What has happened?​

The TSB controlplane and Istio software will have been installed in the istio-system namespace in the cluster:

kubectl get pods -n istio-system

The ControlPlane reports status back to the Management Plane. The installation will also have created namespaces tetrate-system and xcp-multicluster which are used by the TSB system.

Next steps​

Once you have onboarded a Workload Cluster, you may wish to proceed with the Getting Started examples.