Work with clusters

Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped provides a managed Kubernetes service with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Enterprise edition, letting you deploy and run container workloads using industry standard Kubernetes methodologies. Your GDC Sandbox instance comes with three clusters created for you:

  • An org infrastructure cluster, which serves as the control plane for your instance, and
  • Two Kubernetes clusters for running your container workloads.

For details on Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped clusters, see Cluster architecture.

The org infrastructure cluster

GDC Sandbox provides you an org infrastructure cluster called org-1-admin. The org infrastructure runs the control plane and data plane components of the organization. It also hosts the Management API server where all non-container workloads and services are deployed. For example, you would use the Management API server to launch and control VMs.

To work with the Management API server on the command line, do the following:

  1. Make sure that you have downloaded, configured, and authenticated with the gdcloud command as described in Connect.

  2. Set a KUBECONFIG environment variable and download a kubeconfig file for the Management API server:

    export KUBECONFIG=org-1-admin-kubeconfig
gdcloud clusters get-credentials org-1-admin

In a similar way, to work with the org-infra cluster, do the following:

  1. Set a KUBECONFIG environment variable and download a kubeconfig file for the Management API server:

    export KUBECONFIG=org-1-infra-kubeconfig
gdcloud clusters get-credentials org-1-infra

Kubernetes clusters

Your GDC Sandbox instance comes with two pre-created Kubernetes clusters, called user-vm-1 and user-vm-2, in the org-1 organization. Use these clusters for container-based workloads. A Kubernetes cluster is sometimes referred to as a user cluster in Distributed Cloud.

You can attach clusters to a project when you create a project.

To work with Kubernetes clusters on the command line, do the following:

  1. Make sure that you have downloaded, configured, and authenticated with the gdcloud command as described in Connect.

  2. Set a KUBECONFIG environment variable and download a kubeconfig file for the cluster you want to use, either user-vm-1 or user-vm-2. The following example downloads a kubeconfig for user-vm-1:

    export KUBECONFIG=user-vm-1-kubeconfig
gdcloud clusters get-credentials user-vm-1 --zone zone1