This isn’t necessarily a follow-on from the other three blogs so far in this series, but more of an alternative to parts one and two. Following on from those I felt that the process could be much more automated, and less “ssh into every box and change things manually”. After all, the less changes we can make iteratively and imperatively ↗, the more it is programmed or declarative, the better....
Intro I have been experimenting a lot over the past 18 months with containers and in particular, Kubernetes, and one of the core things I always seemed to get hung up on was part-zero - creating the VMs to actually run K8s. I wanted a CLI only way to build a VM template for the OS and then deploy that to the cluster. It turns out that with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (in particular the cloud image OVA) there are a few things need changed from the base install (namely cloud-init) in order to make them play nice with OS Guest Customisation in vCenter....