quick-k8s

Github Action that will automatically create a Kubernetes cluster that lives and runs on Github Actions to allow for deployment and testing of code.

Requirements:

Linux (ARM and x86) Runners and MacOS-13 runners are supported. See this for more information about when other Mac runners will be available.

Usage:

Basic Usage:

steps:
  - name: Set up Quick-K8s
    uses: palmsoftware/[email protected]

This will create you a default 1 worker and 1 control-plane cluster with calico CNI installed. For additional feature enablement, please refer to the flags below:

With Flags (default values shown):

steps:
  - name: Set up Quick-K8s
    uses: palmsoftware/[email protected]
    with:
      apiServerPort: 6443
      apiServerAddress: 0.0.0.0
      disableDefaultCni: true
      ipFamily: dual
      defaultNodeImage: 'kindest/node:v1.33.1@sha256:050072256b9a903bd914c0b2866828150cb229cea0efe5892e2b644d5dd3b34f'

      numControlPlaneNodes: 1
      numWorkerNodes: 1
      installOLM: false
      removeDefaultStorageClass: false
      removeControlPlaneTaint: false

Intelligent Resource Management

This action features intelligent, adaptive disk space management that optimizes performance while ensuring reliability:

🧠 Smart Cleanup Strategy

• Adaptive Cleanup: Automatically detects available space and adjusts cleanup intensity (light vs aggressive)
• Targeted Package Removal: Intelligently identifies and removes only installed large packages (browsers, databases, SDKs)
• Efficient Directory Scanning: Scans for and reports actual sizes before removing large directories
• Performance Timing: Tracks and reports cleanup duration for optimization insights

🔧 Advanced Storage Management

• Smart Storage Relocation: Configures Docker and containerd to use the larger /mnt partition
• Deep Container Cleanup: Thoroughly cleans all Docker/containerd artifacts, images, and storage layers
• Early Validation: Validates minimum disk space requirements (8GB) with clear error reporting
• Real-time Monitoring: Provides detailed disk usage, memory, and system state reporting

🎯 Performance Features

• Skip Unnecessary Work: Avoids aggressive cleanup when sufficient space is already available (>20GB)
• Detailed Progress Reporting: Shows exactly what's being cleaned and how much space is recovered
• Cross-Architecture Support: Optimized for both x86_64 and ARM64 GitHub Actions runners (Ubuntu 22.04/24.04)
• Zero External Dependencies: Uses only built-in bash arithmetic (no bc or other external tools)

History

The proof-of-concept is built upon KinD and was tuned as part of certsuite-sample-workload.

This action is essentially a wrapper around some tried and true best practices for deploying a Kubernetes environment that runs well on Github Actions free-tier Ubuntu runner.

References

• install-oc-tools.sh was a script copied from install-oc-tools and slightly modified for aarch64.
• douglascamata/setup-docker-macos-action@v1-alpha is brought to help install Docker on MacOS.