I have created a simple PHP api application that works with a mysql database to store data. I have been experimenting with Kubernetes on my Windows 10 machine through Minikube.
I have just about got my head round the ideas involved, yet I’m not sure about how to implement this properly. So far I have used Kompose to create a set of yaml files from an existing docker-compose file. This has been half successful.
To get my application code into a pod hosting PHP, I have been using hostPath to share from my local machine. I mount to the minikube machine and share from there. I was having trouble sharing by other means. The application code is hosted in a github repo.
My questions are:
Is mounting my application code into a pod (assuming this is similar to what happens in docker) the correct way to do this? I’m not clear exactly what information is held on an image retrieved from the docker hub. Although I have read up on containers isolating the build environment from your machine.
How does this approach to translate into a production environment hosted on a cloud? I see there are various storage types. I had for example, wanted to try deploying on AWS just to see how this would work in practice.
I’m really looking for guidance to go from the tutorials found on the web working on my machine, to something that could be done for a customer hosted on the cloud. This might scale up to a more microservices style architecture over time.
The approach you are describing is mostly for development setups, where you want to mount your code into the container as a volume so you don't have to rebuild every time your code changes. Typically done with a docker-compose file.
For production setups, you want the docker image to correctly work and only mount volumes to data you want to persist, typically databases are the core example. For this EKS is deeply integrated into the AWS infrastructure and will create EBS volumes on demand. You don't need to provision any volume or even care for most cases (unless you need multiple read-write volumes needed for scaling).
For a PHP application you really should not persist any data in the pod, because it will create other issues when you need to scale the application. Also, a good approach for managing files that need to persist is S3 (AWS simple storage service).
So generally speaking, you need a deployment per application a service to access each pod on that application and then an ingress object to route traffic from the internet to each pod.
Your application docker image is really the core. You just build it with your code inside. Make sure to pass configuration using environment variable or configuration file so you can connect to the database.
Now for kubernetes, for each compoment (e.g. PHP application, MySQL) you will most likely create a deployment k8s manifest that points to the docker image and add some configuration environment variables.
For production, you will need persistence volume. On aws you can simply use EBS-backed volumes
To get traffic from Internet to your PHP application, you will need to add one or more k8s components:
K8s Service manifest that exposes your PHP deployment/pod on a stable address. If you only have q or very few services, you can use LoadBalancer which on cloud like AWS will create an ALB/ELB (might need to add annotation to your service)
An ingress which is just a reverse proxy (contour, nginx, traefik). On cloud environment it will map to an ALB/ELB. The advantage of this is that you can have a single ALB for all your services i.e. save money. Also you can configure routing path or TLS termination in one place.
I'm using Docker I have implemented a system to deploy environments (on a single server) based on Git branches using Traefik (*.dev.domain.com) and Docker Compose templates.
I like Kubernetes and I've never switched to it since I'm limited to one single server for my infrastructure. I've only used it using local installations (Docker for Windows).
So, my question is: does it make sense to run a Kubernetes "cluster" (master and nodes) on a single server to orchestrate and route containers (in place of Traefik/Rancher/Docker Compose)?
This use is for development and staging only for the moment, so high availability is not a prerequisite.
Thanks.
If it is not a production environment, it doesn't matter how many nodes you are using. So yes, it should be just fine in this case. But make sure all the k8s features you will need in production are available in test/dev, to keep things similar and portable.
AFAIU,
I do not see a requirement for kubernetes unless we are doing below at least for single host using native docker run or docker-compose or docker engine swarm mode -
Make sure there are enough(>=2) replicas of your app in a single server and you are balancing the load across those apps docker containers.
If you want to go bit advanced, we should be able to scale up & down dynamically (docker swarm mode supports this out of the box else use jwilder nginx proxy).
Your deployment should not cause a downtime. Make sure a single container is always healthy at any instant of time while deploying.
Container should auto heal(restart automatically) in case your HTTP or TCP health check fails.
Doing all of the above will certainly put you in a better place but single host is still a single source of failure which you got to deal with at regular intervals.
Preferred : if possible try to start with docker engine swarm mode or kubernetes single master or minikube. This will automatically take care of all the above scenarios out of the box and will also allow you to further scale up anytime by adding more nodes without changing much in your YML files for docker swarm or kubernetes.
Ref -
https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/independent/create-cluster-kubeadm/
https://docs.docker.com/engine/swarm/
I would use single host k8s only if I managed clusters with the same project that I would like to deploy to the said host. This enables you to reuse manifests and all the automation you've created for your clusters.
Have I had single host environments only, I would probably stick to docker-compose.
If you're looking to try it out your easiest options are probably minikube (easy to run single-node cluster locally but without some features) or using one of the free trial accounts for a managed Kubernetes service from one of the big cloud providers (fully-featured and multi-node but limited use before you have to pay).
How should applications be scripted/automatically deployed when in LXD containers?
For example is best way to deploy applications in LXD containers to use a bash script (which deploys an application)? How to execute this bash script inside the container by executing a command on the host?
Are there any tools/methods of doing this in a similar way to Docker recipes?
In my case, I use Ansible to:
build the LXD containers (web, database, redis for example).
connect to the containers and deploy the services and code needed.
you can build your own images for example with the services and/or code already deployed and build specific containers from this images.
I was doing this from before LXD had Ansible support (Ansible 2.2) i prefer to use ssh instead of lxd connection, when i connect to the containers to deploy services/code. they comes with a profile where i had setup my ssh public key (to have direct ssh connection by keys ... no passwords)
Take a look at my open source project on bitbucket devops_lxd_containers It includes:
Scripts to build lxd image templates including Apache, tomcat, haproxy.
Scripts to demonstrate custom application image builds such as Apache hosting and key/value content and haproxy configured as a router.
Code to launch the containers and map ports so they are accessible to the larger network
Code to configure haproxy as layer 7 proxy to route http requests between boxes and containers based on uri prefix routing. Based on where it previously deployed and mapped ports.
At the higher level it accepts a data drive spec and will deploy an entire environment compose of many containers spread across many hosts and hook them all up to act as a cohesive whole via a layer 7 proxy.
Extensive documentation showing how I accomplished each major step using code snippets before automating.
Code to support zero-outage upgrades using the layer7 ability to gracefully bleed off old connections while accepting new connections at the new layer.
The entire system is built on the premise that image building is best done in layers. We build a updated Ubuntu image. From it we build a hardened Ubuntu image. From it we build a basic Apache image. From it we build an application specific image like our apacheKV sample. The goal is to never rebuild any more than once and to re-use the common functionality such as the basicJDK as the source for all JDK dependent images so we can avoid having duplicate code in any location. I have strived to keep Image or template creation completely separate from deployment and port mapping. The exception is that I could not complete creation of the layer 7 routing image until we knew everything about how other images would be mapped.
I've been using Hashicorp Packer with the ansible provisioner using ansible_connection = lxd
Some notes here for constructing a template
When iterating through local files on your host system you may need to be using ansible_connection = local (e.g for stat & friends)
Using local_action in ansible with the lxd connection is still
action inside the container when using stat (but not with include_vars & lookup function for files)
Using lots of debug messages in Ansible is helpful to know which local environment ansible is actually operating in.
I'm surprised no one here mentioned Canonicals own tool for managing LXD.
https://juju.is
it is super simple, well supported, and the only caveat is it requires you turn off ipv6 at the LXD/LXC side of things (in the network bridge)
snap install juju --classic
juju bootstrap localhost
from there you can learn about juju models, deploy machines or prebaked images like ubuntuOS
juju deploy ubuntu
Good day
We have a development environment that consists of 6 virtual machines. Currently we are using Vagrant and Ansible with VirtualBox.
As you can imagine, hosting this environment is a maintenance nightmare particularly as versions of software/OS change. Not too mention resource load for developer machines.
We have started migrating some virtual machines to docker. But this itself poses problems around orchestration, correct configurations, communication etc. This led me to Kubernetes.
Would someone be so kind as to provide some reasoning as to whether Kubernetes would or wouldn't be the right tool for the job? That is managing and orchestrating 'development' docker containers.
Thanks
This is quite complex topic and many things have to be considered if it's worth to use k8s as local dev environment. Especially I used it when I wanted to have my local developer environment very close to production one which was running on Kubernetes. This helped to avoid many configuration bugs.
In my opinion Kubernetes(k8s) will provide you all you need for a development environment.
It gives you much flexibility and does much configuration itself. Few examples:
An easy way to deploy new version into local kubernetes stack
You prepare k8s replication controller files for each of your application module (keep in mind that they need to be stateless modules)
In replication controller you specify the docker image and that's it.
Using this approach you can push new docker images to local docker_registry and then using kubectl control the lifecycle of your application.
Easy way to scale your application modules
For example:
kubectl scale rc your_application_service --replicas=3
This way k8s will check how many pods you have running for your service and if it recognises that the number is smaller then the replicas value it will create new to satisfy the replicas number.
It's endless topic and many other things come to my mind, but I would suggest you to try it out.
There is a https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/docs/devel/developer-guides/vagrant.md project for running the k8s cluster in vagrant.
Of course you have to remember that if you have many services all of them have to be pushed to local repository and run by k8s. This will require some time but if you automate local deploy with some custom scripts you won't regret.
As wsl mentioned before, it is a quite complex topic. But i'm doing this as well at the moment. So let me summaries some things for you:
With Kubernetes (k8s) you're going to orchestrate your SaaS Application. In best case, it is a Cloud-native Application. The properties/requirements for a Cloud-native Application are formulated by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which basically were formed around k8s, after Google donates it to the Linux Foundation.
So the properties/requirements for a Cloud-native Application are: Container packaged, Dynamically managed and Micro-services oriented (cncf.io/about/charter). You will benefit mostly from k8s, if your applications are micro-service based and every service has a separate container.
With micro-service based applications, every service can be developed independently. The developer only needs to follow the 12Factor Method (12factor.net) for example (use env var instead of hard coded IP addresses, etc).
In the next step the developer build the container for a service and pushes it the a container registry. For a local develop environment, you may need to run a container registry inside the cluster as well, so the developer can push and test his code locally.
Then you're able to define your k8s replication-controllers, services, PetSets, etc. with Ports, Port-mapping, env vars, Container Images... and create and run it inside the cluster.
The k8s-documentation recommend Minikube for running k8s locally (kubernetes.io/docs/getting-started-guides/minikube/). With Minikube you got features like DNS, NodePorts, ConfigMaps and Secrets
Dashboards.
But I choose the multi node CoreOS Kubernetes with Vagrant Cluster for my Development Environment as Puja Abbassi mentioned in the Blog "Finding The Right Local Kubernetes Development Environment" (https://deis.com/blog/2016/local-kubernetes-development-environment/), it is closer to the my production environment (12Factor: 10 - Dev/prod parity).
With the Vagrant Environment you got features like:
Networking with flannel
Service Discovery with etcd
DNS names for a set of containers with SkyDNS
internal load balancing
If you want to know, how everything works look inside this Github repo github.com/coreos/coreos-kubernetes/tree/master/multi-node (vagrant and generic folder).
So you have to ask yourself, if you or your developers really need to run a complete "cloud environment" locally. In many cases a developer can develop a service (based on micro-services and containers) independently.
But sometimes it is necessary to have multiple or all services run on your local machine as a dev-environment.
Kubernetes seems to be all about deploying containers to a cloud of clusters. What it doesn't seem to touch is development and staging environments (or such).
During development you want to be as close as possible to production environment with some important changes:
Deployed locally (or at least somewhere where you and only you can access)
Use latest source code on page refresh (supposing its a website; ideally page auto-refresh on local file save which can be done if you mount source code and use some stuff like Yeoman).
Similarly one may want a non-public environment to do continuous integration.
Does Kubernetes support such kind of development environment or is it something one has to build, hoping that during production it'll still work?
Update (2016-07-15)
With the release of Kubernetes 1.3, Minikube is now the recommended way to run Kubernetes on your local machine for development.
You can run Kubernetes locally via Docker. Once you have a node running you can launch a pod that has a simple web server and mounts a volume from your host machine. When you hit the web server it will read from the volume and if you've changed the file on your local disk it can serve the latest version.
We've been working on a tool to do this. Basic idea is you have remote Kubernetes cluster, effectively a staging environment, and then you run code locally and it gets proxied to the remote cluster. You get transparent network access, environment variables copied over, access to volumes... as close as feasible to remote environment, but with your code running locally and under your full control.
So you can do live development, say. Docs at http://telepresence.io
The sort of "hot reload" is something we have plans to add, but is not as easy as it could be today. However, if you're feeling adventurous you can use rsync with docker exec, kubectl exec, or osc exec (all do the same thing roughly) to sync a local directory into a container whenever it changes. You can use rsync with kubectl or osc exec like so:
# rsync using osc as netcat
$ rsync -av -e 'osc exec -ip test -- /bin/bash' mylocalfolder/ /tmp/remote/folder
I've just started with Skaffold
It's really useful to apply changes in the code automatically to a local cluster.
To deploy a local cluster, the best way is Minikube or just Docker for Mac and Windows, both includes a Kubernetes interface.
EDIT 2022: By now, there are obviously dozens of way to provision k8s, unlike 2015 when we started using it. kubeadm, microk8s, k3s, kube-spray, etc.
My advice: (If your cluster can't fit on your workstation/laptop,) Rent a Hetzner server for 40 euro a month, and run WSL2 if on Windows.
Set up k8s cluster on the remote machine (with any of the above, I prefer microk8s these days). Set up Docker and Telepresence on your local Linux/Mac/WSL2 env. Install kubectl and connect it to the remote cluster.
Telepresence will let you replace a remote pod with a local docker pod, with access to local files (hopefully the same git repo that's used to build the pod you're developing/replacing), and possibly nodemon (or other language-specific auto-source-code-reload system).
Write bash functions. I cannot stress this enough, this will save you hundreds of hours of time. If replacing the pod and starting to develop isn't one line / two words, then you're doing it not-well-enough.
2016 answer below:
Another great starting point is this Vagrant setup, esp. if your host OS is Windows. The obvious advantages being
quick and painless setup
easy to destroy / recreate the machine
implicit limit on resources
ability to test horizontal scaling by creating multiple nodes
The disadvantages - you need lot of RAM, and VirtualBox is VirtualBox... for better or worse.
A mixed advantage / disadvantage is mapping files through NFS. In our setup, we created two sets of RC definitions - one that just download a docker image of our application servers; the other with 7 extra lines that set up file mapping from HostOS -> Vagrant -> VirtualBox -> CoreOS -> Kubernetes pod; overwriting the source code from the Docker image.
The downside of this is NFS file cache - with it, it's problematic, without it, it's problematically slow. Even setting mount_options: 'nolock,vers=3,udp,noac' doesn't get rid of caching problems completely, but it works most of the time. Some Gulp tasks ran in a container can take 5 minutes when they take 8 seconds on host OS. A good compromise seems to be mount_options: 'nolock,vers=3,udp,ac,hard,noatime,nodiratime,acregmin=2,acdirmin=5,acregmax=15,acdirmax=15'.
As for automatic code reload, that's language specific, but we're happy with Django's devserver for Python, and Nodemon for Node.js. For frontend projects, you can of course do a lot with something like gulp+browserSync+watch, but for many developers it's not difficult to serve from Apache and just do traditional hard refresh.
We keep 4 sets of yaml files for Kubernetes. Dev, "devstable", stage, prod. The differences between those are
env variables explicitly setting the environment (dev/stage/prod)
number of replicas
devstable, stage, prod uses docker images
dev uses docker images, and maps NFS folder with source code over them.
It's very useful to create a lot of bash aliases and autocomplete - I can just type rec users and it will do kubectl delete -f ... ; kubectl create -f .... If I want the whole set up started, I type recfo, and it recreates a dozen services, pulling the latest docker images, importing the latest db dump from Staging env and cleaning up old Docker files to save space.
See https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/12278 for how to mount a volume from the host machine, the equivalent of:
docker run -v hostPath:ContainerPath
Having a nice local development feedback loop is a topic of rapid development in the Kubernetes ecosystem.
Breaking this question down, there are a few tools that I believe support this goal well.
Docker for Mac Kubernetes
Docker for Mac Kubernetes (Docker Desktop is the generic cross platform name) provides an excellent option for local development. For virtualization, it uses HyperKit which is built on the native Hypervisor framework in macOS instead of VirtualBox.
The Kubernetes feature was first released as beta on the edge channel in January 2018 and has come a long way since, becoming a certified Kubernetes in April 2018, and graduating to the stable channel in July 2018.
In my experience, it's much easier to work with than Minikube, particularly on macOS, and especially when it comes to issues like RBAC, Helm, hypervisor, private registry, etc.
Helm
As far as distributing your code and pulling updates locally, Helm is one of the most popular options. You can publish your applications via CI/CD as Helm charts (and also the underlying Docker images which they reference). Then you can pull these charts from your Helm chart registry locally and upgrade on your local cluster.
Azure Draft
You can also use a tool like Azure Draft to do simple local deploys and generate basic Helm charts from common language templates, sort of like buildpacks, to automate that piece of the puzzle.
Skaffold
Skaffold is like Azure Draft but more mature, much broader in scope, and made by Google. It has a very pluggable architecture. I think in the future more people will use it for local app development for Kubernetes.
If you have used React, I think of Skaffold as "Create React App for Kubernetes".
Kompose or Compose on Kubernetes
Docker Compose, while unrelated to Kubernetes, is one alternative that some companies use to provide a simple, easy, and portable local development environment analogous to the Kubernetes environment that they run in production. However, going this route means diverging your production and local development setups.
Kompose is a Docker Compose to Kubernetes converter. This could be a useful path for someone already running their applications as collections of containers locally.
Compose on Kubernetes is a recently open sourced (December 2018) offering from Docker which allows deploying Docker Compose files directly to a Kubernetes cluster via a custom controller.
Kubespary is helpful setting up local clusters. Mostly, I used vagrant based cluster on local machine.
Kubespray configuration
You could tweak these variables to have the desired kubernetes version.
The disadvantage of using minkube is that it spawns another virtual machine over your machine. Also, with latest minikube version it minimum requires to have 2 CPU and 2GB of RAM from your system, which makes it pretty heavy If you do not have the system with enough resources.
This is the reason I switched to microk8s for development on kubernetes and I love it. microk8s supports the DNS, local-storage, dashboard, istio, ingress and many more, everything you need to test your microservices.
It is designed to be a fast and lightweight upstream Kubernetes installation isolated from your local environment. This isolation is achieved by packaging all the binaries for Kubernetes, Docker.io, iptables, and CNI in a single snap package.
A single node kubernetes cluster can be installed within a minute with a single command:
snap install microk8s --classic
Make sure your system doesn't have any docker or kubelet service running. Microk8s will install all the required services automatically.
Please have a look at the following link to enable other add ons in microk8s.
https://github.com/ubuntu/microk8s
You can check the status using:
velotio#velotio-ThinkPad-E470:~/PycharmProjects/k8sClient$ microk8s.status
microk8s is running
addons:
ingress: disabled
dns: disabled
metrics-server: disabled
istio: disabled
gpu: disabled
storage: disabled
dashboard: disabled
registry: disabled
Have a look at https://github.com/okteto/okteto and Okteto Cloud.
The value proposition is to have the classical development experience than working locally, prior to docker, where you can have hot-reloads, incremental builds, debuggers... but all your local changes are immediately synchronized to a remote container. Remote containers give you access to the speed of cloud, allow a new level of collaboration, and integrates development in a production-like environment. Also, it eliminates the burden of local installations.
As specified before by Robert, minikube is the way to go.
Here is a quick guide to get started with minikube. The general steps are:
Install minikube
Create minikube cluster (in a Virtual Machine which can be VirtualBox or Docker for Mac or HyperV in case of Windows)
Create Docker image of your application file (by using Dockerfile)
Run the image by creating a Deployment
Create a service which exposes your application so that you can access it.
Here is the way I did a local set up for Kubernetes in Windows 10: -
Use Docker Desktop
Enable Kubernetes in the settings option of Docker Desktop
In Docker Desktop by default resource allocated for Memory is 2GB so to use Kubernetes
with Docker Desktop increase the memory.
Install kubectl as a client to talk to Kubernetes cluster
Run command kubectl config get-contexts to get the available cluster
Run command kubectl config use-context docker-desktop to use the docker desktop
Build a docker image of your application
Write a YAML file (descriptive method to create your deployment in Kubernetes) pointing
to the image created in above step cluster
Expose a service of type node port for each of your deployment to make it available to
the outside world