We’ll start by deciding the name of our soon to be created cluster. We’ll choose to call it devops23.k8s.local. The latter part of the name (.k8s.local) is mandatory if we do not have a DNS at hand. It’s a naming convention kops uses to decide whether to create a gossip-based cluster or to rely on a publicly available domain.

If this would be a “real” production cluster, you would probably have a DNS for it, or if you have your own DNS and you are planning to use it to set-up cluster, there will be minor additional steps to the things we have done so far, please refer to Kops for exact steps.

However, since we cannot be sure whether you do have one for the exercises in this course, we’ll play it safe, and proceed with the gossip mode.

We’ll store the name in an environment variable so that it is easily accessible