Kubernetes tutorial

Kubernetes tutorial
Docs

Kubernetes enables developers to deploy their applications themselves and as often as they want, without requiring any assistance from the operations (ops) team. But Kubernetes doesn’t benefit only developers. It also helps the ops team by automatically monitoring and rescheduling those apps in the event of a hardware failure. The focus for system administrators (sysadmins) shifts from supervising individual apps to mostly supervising and managing Kubernetes and the rest of the infrastructure, while Kubernetes itself takes care of the apps.

Kubernetes abstracts away the hardware infrastructure and exposes your whole datacenter as a single enormous computational resource. It allows you to deploy and run your software components without having to know about the actual servers underneath.

Why is it needed

Because of movement from monoliths to microservices, there needs to be

A system for orchestration of microservices
Granular control of microservices
Providing a consistent environment to applications
Moving to continuous delivery

Architecture

Components:

API server: communication for developers and other components
Scheduler: app scheduler - schedule resource allocation
Control manager: cluster-level functions: replicating components, track worker nodes, handling node failures etc
etcd: distributed state and config storage, part of coreos (alt zookeeper)
Container runtime: deprecated docker moved to CRI, supports containerd and CRIO
Kubelet: local container manager, sync with api server
kube-proxy: handles network routing for containers

Handles 4 basic resources:

Compute
Memory
Storage
Network

Pod

Pod is a co-located group of containers and represents the basic building block in Kubernetes.

Mostly, a pod = a container. Actual usage of pods containing multiple containers in very niche usecases like container placement constraints:

Sharing network interface & ip address
Sharing hostname
IPC / unix socket communication
Filesystem isolation
Functions as a scaling unit

Service

Concept introduced to group pods providing similar services for networking & service discovery.

Single IP address & port
Routing and hostname resolution
Connect to external load balancers

Application layer routing:

NodePort
1. Reserve a port across all nodes
2. All nodes running service can be used
LoadBalancer
1. Use ELB
Ingress controller
1. Global nginx + ELB

Persistence

Cloud
- EBS
- EFS
persistentVolumeClaim
- pre-provisioned
- local
configMap
secret
Git repo etc
- wtf

ENV vars, Configmaps, secrets

ENV vars: pod definitions

Configmaps:

storage for key-value pairs
meant for configuration storage
treated as a volume
passed to containers as env vars
can be passed as command line arg or file

Secrets:

storage for key-value pairs
same as configmaps
encrypted

Image pull secrets:

same as secrets
used to pull container images from external services

Deployment

Supports multiple deployment patterns:

Rolling
Blue-green
Canary

Orchestration

Supports various replica sets

Hands-on

1. Download and install kind

Arch / Manjaro:

yay -Ss aur/kind-bin

Other Linux:

curl -Lo ./kind https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/dl/v0.10.0/kind-linux-amd64
chmod +x ./kind
mv ./kind /usr/bin/kind

Mac:

brew install kind

Windows:

🙂

2. Use kind to bootstrap a local kubernetes cluster

kind create cluster

Creating cluster "kind" ...
 ✓ Ensuring node image (kindest/node:v1.19.1) 🖼
 ✓ Preparing nodes 📦
 ✓ Writing configuration 📜
 ✓ Starting control-plane 🕹️
 ✓ Installing CNI 🔌
 ✓ Installing StorageClass 💾
Set kubectl context to "kind-kind"
You can now use your cluster with:

kubectl cluster-info --context kind-kind

Not sure what to do next? 😅  Check out https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/docs/user/quick-start/

3. See status of cluster and confirm it is running

kubectl cluster-info --context kind-kind

kind get clusters

4. Get a docker-compose file

Generate an arda project:

export project_name=diamondhands
export project_title="Diamond hands :diamond:"
export project_description="Forever HODLer"

export db_name=gold
export db_username=diamond
export db_password=password

make new
cd diamondhands
# You should have a docker-compose.yml file here

Modify as per docker v3 specs.

Or use this:

version: "3"

services:
  primary-db:
    image: postgres:12-alpine
    env_file:
      - ./env-sandbox/db.env
    ports:
      - "5432:5432"
    volumes:
      - primary-db-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    deploy:
      mode: replicated
      replicas: 1
      resources:
        limits:
          cpus: '0.001'
          memory: 1024M
        reservations:
          cpus: '0.001'
          memory: 512M
    labels:
      kompose.service.type: "clusterip"

volumes:
  primary-db-data:

mkdir env-sandbox
touch env-sandbox/db.env

POSTGRES_PASSWORD=${PGPASSWORD}
POSTGRES_USER=${PGUSER}
POSTGRES_DB=${PGDATABASE}

Or fetch your own docker-compose v3 file.

5. Create namespace

apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
  name: ktest

Store as namespace.yaml.

5. Prepare kubectl

KUBECTL='kubectl --namespace ktest'
# KUBECTL='kubectl --dry-run=client'
$KUBECTL apply -f ./namespace.yml

export PROJECT_NAME=diamondhands
export ENVIRONMENT=sandbox

6. Generate kubernetes resource files

mkdir kubernetes
cd kubernetes
kompose convert --error-on-warning --provider kubernetes -c -f ../docker-compose.yml
kompose convert --error-on-warning --provider kubernetes -f ../docker-compose.yml

Set some default options to false:

for pod in *-pod.yaml; do
    yq -y '.spec.enableServiceLinks = false' $pod > tmp
    mv tmp $pod
done

7. Create configmaps

Format all envs into a directory .env.

for filename in env-*; do
  CFG_NAME=$(echo $filename | cut -d '.' -f 1)
  $KUBECTL create configmap --from-env-file ./${filename} env-${ENVIRONMENT}-${CFG_NAME}-env || true
done

$KUBECTL create configmap --from-env-file ./db.env env-sandbox-db-env

8. Create secret if pulling image from external sources

cd ..

ECR:

export ENVIRONMENT=sandbox
export AWS_ACCOUNT_ID=1
export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=ap-south-1

PASS=$(aws ecr get-login-password --region $AWS_DEFAULT_REGION)

$KUBECTL create secret docker-registry $ENVIRONMENT-aws-ecr-$AWS_DEFAULT_REGION \
  --docker-server=$AWS_ACCOUNT_ID.dkr.ecr.$AWS_DEFAULT_REGION.amazonaws.com \
  --docker-username=AWS \
  --docker-password=$PASS \
  --docker-email=lel@lol.com --namespace ktest

Quay:

EXISTS=$($KUBECTL get secret "quay.io" | tail -n 1 | cut -d ' ' -f 1)
if [ "$EXISTS" != "quay.io" ]; then
  $KUBECTL create secret docker-registry quay.io \
    --docker-server=quay.io \
    --docker-username=setuinfra+your-bot-name \
    --docker-password=get-your-won-key \
    --docker-email=lel@lol.com --namespace ktest
fi

9. Deploy resources

$KUBECTL apply -f ./kubernetes/ --namespace ktest

10. Confirm deployment

kubectl logs primary-db-79df5979cb-lrljd -n ktest --tail 100 --follow

kubectl exec --stdin --tty primary-db-79df5979cb-lrljd -n ktest -- /bin/bash

kubectl Cheatsheet in zsh

https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/kubectl/cheatsheet/

alias k="kubectl"
source <(kubectl completion zsh)
source <(kompose completion zsh)
alias k_services="k get services --sort-by=.metadata.name --all-namespaces"
alias k_pods="k get pods --all-namespaces -o wide"
alias k_restart="k get pods --all-namespaces --sort-by='.status.containerStatuses[0].restartCount'"
alias k_volumes="k get pv --all-namespaces --sort-by=.spec.capacity.storage"
alias k_running="k get pods --all-namespaces --field-selector=status.phase=Running"
alias k_nodes="k get nodes --all-namespaces"
alias k_shell="k exec --stdin --tty $POD -- /bin/sh"
alias k_events="k get events --watch --all-namespaces"
alias k_secrets="k get secrets --all-namespaces"
alias k_configs="k get configMaps --all-namespaces"
alias k_context="k config current-context"
alias k_set_context="k config use-context "
alias k_images="kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -o jsonpath="{..image}" |\
tr -s '[[:space:]]' '\n' |\
sort |\
uniq -c"

Docs

Kubernetes local setup 💻

https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/ https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/docs/user/quick-start/

Translate docker compose to helm 🆎

https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/translate-compose-kubernetes/ https://kompose.io/user-guide/

Docker compose v3 specs 🗒️

https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-file-v3/#links https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/service/#publishing-services-service-types

Load balancer and ingress controllers ☸️

https://medium.com/google-cloud/kubernetes-nodeport-vs-loadbalancer-vs-ingress-when-should-i-use-what-922f010849e0 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45079988/ingress-vs-load-balancer https://github.com/Kong/kubernetes-ingress-controller https://docs.konghq.com/kubernetes-ingress-controller/1.1.x/guides/getting-started/ https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx/

Config Management 🗒️

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/configuration/configmap/

Secrets ☣️

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/configuration/secret/

Databases 💾

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/to-run-or-not-to-run-a-database-on-kubernetes-what-to-consider

Best practices ✨

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes/your-guide-kubernetes-best-practices https://techbeacon.com/devops/one-year-using-kubernetes-production-lessons-learned

Debugging 😭

https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug-application-cluster/debug-service/
Shell: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug-application-cluster/get-shell-running-container/
For running containers: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug-application-cluster/debug-running-pod/#container-exec
For stopped containers: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug-application-cluster/debug-running-pod/#ephemeral-container
Extensions: https://github.com/aylei/kubectl-debug#install-the-kubectl-debug-plugin

Stopped container debugging: Override the default troubleshooting image

kubectl debug POD_NAME --image aylei/debug-jvm

Override entrypoint of debug container

kubectl debug POD_NAME --image aylei/debug-jvm /bin/bash

Alternatives 😒

ECS
Docker swarm
Nomad + Consul

pritamprasd/kubernetes_tutorial