How to Install Mulesoft Runtime Fabric on GKE

byGonzalo Marcos -
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is the managed service provided by Google Cloud that allows you to run, manage, and scale containerized applications using Kubernetes. For us, Mulesoft Architects and Developers, GKE is one of the most popular options to install Runtime Fabric.
In this post, we're going to see, step by step, how to install Runtime Fabric on a GKE cluster.

Before installing anything we need a couple of things:
  • A GKE cluster, up and running
  • An Ingress controller installed on that cluster.
If you don't have them, check out this other post to see how to do it. Once that is done, follow the next steps:

Create the Runtime Fabric Instance

  • Head to Anypoint Platform control plane
  • Go to Runtime Manager > Runtime Fabrics and click on Create Runtime Fabric

  • Next, provide a name for your RTF cluster and choose the Google Kubernetes Engine installation type. Click Next

  • Click Accept in the Support responsibility message

Set up the command line tools

For GKE, Runtime Fabric can be installed in two ways:
  • Using the RTFCTL command line tool - Follow the steps in this post to install and set up the RTFCTL utility.
  • Using Helm - - Follow the steps in this post to install and set up Helm on your computer
In this post we'll see the first option, using the RTFCTL. The RTFCTL tool uses kubeconfig files to connect to our K8s cluster. So, before we run any command make sure your kubeconfig file is pointing to the right cluster with kubectl. You can check the current context of the kubeconfig file with the command:
kubectl config current-context

After installing GKE, the installation process adds the details of the GKE to your kubeconfig and sets the current context to this cluster. But If your current context is not pointing to your GKE or the cluster has not been added you can run the following command:
gcloud container clusters get-credentials runtime-fabric --zone australia-southeast1 --project playground-s-11-9cfd3fdc
  • if you get the error
    run the following 
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/cloud.google.gpg] https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt cloud-sdk main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-cloud-sdk.list
curl https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg | sudo apt-key --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/cloud.google.gpg add -
sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install google-cloud-sdk-gke-gcloud-auth-plugin kubectl
export USE_GKE_GCLOUD_AUTH_PLUGIN=True


Run the installation with RTFCTL

  • Once the instance is created, if you click on it, you'll see the two command line tools for installation. Helm and RTFCTL. Click on RTFCTL.

  • Copy the value of activation data to the clipboard or to a file.
  • Run the following RTFCTL command using the activation data you’ve just copied to check if the cluster is ready to host RTF
rtfctl validate [ACTIVATION_DATA]
  • If the output was successful run the following command to install RTF:
rtfctl install [ACTIVATION_DATA]
  • After a few minutes, if everything went well you should see your new RTF cluster on the Runtime Fabrics home page:
  • Click on your new RTF cluster and verify you see the All systems operational message:

Insert License

  • Encode the License Key and save it to an env variable. For Linux:
BASE64_ENCODED_LICENSE="$(base64 -w0 license.lic)"
  • Apply the license with rtfctl
rtfctl apply mule-license $BASE64_ENCODED_LICENSE
  • Validate status with rtfctl
rtfctl status


  • Check in the RTF cluster page that you now see a valid license

With that, the installation of our Runtime Fabric instance on AKS is complete. The next step is the initial setup of the Runtime Fabric, before deploying any app. We'll cover that in our next post:


Initial Setup for Runtime Fabric
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