aks-engine/docs/howto/building-windows-kubernetes-binaries.md

Building Windows Kubernetes Binaries

Background

Microsoft maintains a fork of the Kubernetes project at https://github.com/Azure/kubernetes which includes patches not yet included in upstream Kubernetes for release 1.7 and 1.8; these are needed for Windows containers to function. From release 1.9, all Windows features are in upstream and Windows binaries no longer needs to be built from Azure fork.

Instructions

The following instructions show how to deploy the Windows Kubernetes Binaries and deploy them to an Azure Storage Account.

Prerequisites

• Azure Storage Account and Azure Storage Container to store Windows binaries
• Access to [wincni.exe] and hns.psm1. Windows CNI is a plugin that supports the Container Network Interface (CNI) network model and interfaces with the Windows Host Networking Service (HNS) to configure host networking and policy.
• Docker installed and running. MacOS users using Docker for Mac must have at least 3GB of memory allocated to Docker or building will likely fail.

build-windows-k8s.sh does the following:

• Checks out the fork of Azure/kubernetes (includes Windows fixes not yet in upstream Kubernetes, needed for Windows containers to function)
• Builds kubelet.exe and kube-proxy.exe from source in a Docker container
• Downloads kubectl.exe for desired release
• Downloads NSSM which is used to start kubelet and kube-proxy on Windows
• Downloads [Windows CNI exe and script] (https://github.com/Microsoft/SDN/tree/master/Kubernetes/windows/)
• Creates an .zip archive of these Windows components
• Uploads archive to Azure Blob Storage

More information about building Kubernetes binaries from source here: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/tree/master/build/

Set Azure Storage credentials and Container name

A storage container is used to upload the resulting archive artifact.

$ export AZURE_STORAGE_CONNECTION_STRING="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=MyStorageAccountName;AccountKey=..." \
AZURE_STORAGE_CONTAINER_NAME=MyStorageContainerName

Run make build-windows-k8s

Usage: make build-windows-k8s K8S_VERSION=1.7.4 PATCH_VERSION=1

This will build Kubernetes binaries for Windows agents based on Kubernetes release version 1.7.4 and place the zip artifact in Azure Blob Storage.