Quickstart Guide¶
To quickly set up a testing cluster using MetalK8s, you need 3 machines running CentOS 7.4 to which you have SSH access (these can be VMs). Each machine acting as a Kubernetes node (all of them, in this example) also need to have at least one disk available to provision storage volumes.
Todo
Give some sizing examples
Defining an Inventory¶
To tell the Ansible-based deployment system on which machines MetalK8s should be installed, a so-called inventory needs to be provided. This inventory contains a file listing all the hosts comprising the cluster, as well as some configuration.
First, create a directory, e.g. inventory/quickstart-cluster
, in which
the inventory will be stored. For our setup, we need to create two files. One
listing all the hosts, aptly called hosts
:
node-01 ansible_host=10.0.0.1 ansible_user=centos
node-02 ansible_host=10.0.0.2 ansible_user=centos
node-03 ansible_host=10.0.0.3 ansible_user=centos
[kube-master]
node-01
node-02
node-03
[etcd]
node-01
node-02
node-03
[kube-node]
node-01
node-02
node-03
[k8s-cluster:children]
kube-node
kube-master
Make sure to change IP-addresses, usernames etc. according to your infrastructure.
In a second file, called kube-node.yml
in a group_vars
subdirectory of our inventory, we declare how to setup storage (in the
default configuration) on hosts in the kube-node group, i.e. hosts on which
Pods will be scheduled:
metalk8s_lvm_drives_vg_metalk8s: ['/dev/vdb']
In the above, we assume every kube-node host has a disk available as
/dev/vdb
which can be used to set up Kubernetes PersistentVolumes. For
more information about storage, see Storage Architecture.
Upgrading from MetalK8s < 0.2.0¶
MetalK8s 0.2.0 introduced changes to persistent storage provisioning which are not backwards-compatible with MetalK8s 0.1. These changes include:
- The default LVM VG was renamed from kubevg to vg_metalk8s.
- Only PersistentVolumes required by MetalK8s services are created by default.
- Instead of using dictionaries to configure the storage, these are now flattened.
When a MetalK8s 0.1 configuration is detected, the playbook will report an error.
Given an old configuration looking like this
metal_k8s_lvm:
vgs:
kubevg:
drives: ['/dev/vdb']
the following values must be set in kube-node.yml
to maintain the
pre-0.2 behaviour:
Disable deployment of ‘default’ volumes:
metalk8s_lvm_default_vg: False
Register the kubevg VG to be managed:
metalk8s_lvm_vgs: ['kubevg']
Use
/dev/vdb
as a volume for the kubevg VG:metalk8s_lvm_drives_kubevg: ['/dev/vdb']
Note how the VG name is appended to the metalk8s_lvm_drives_ prefix to configure a VG-specific setting.
Create and register the default MetalK8s 0.1 LVs and PersistentVolumes:
metalk8s_lvm_lvs_kubevg: lv01: size: 52G lv02: size: 52G lv03: size: 52G lv04: size: 11G lv05: size: 11G lv06: size: 11G lv07: size: 5G lv08: size: 5G
Entering the MetalK8s Shell¶
To easily install a supported version of Ansible and its dependencies, as well as some Kubernetes tools (kubectl and helm), we provide a make target which installs these in a local environment. To enter this environment, run make shell (this takes a couple of seconds on first run):
$ make shell
Creating virtualenv...
Installing Python dependencies...
Downloading kubectl...
Downloading Helm...
Launching MetalK8s shell environment. Run 'exit' to quit.
(metal-k8s) $
Now we’re all set to deploy a cluster:
(metal-k8s) $ ansible-playbook -i inventory/quickstart-cluster -b playbooks/deploy.yml
Grab a coffee and wait for deployment to end.
Inspecting the cluster¶
Once deployment finished, a file containing credentials to access the cluster is
created: inventory/quickstart-cluster/artifacts/admin.conf
. We can
export this location in the shell such that the kubectl and
helm tools know how to contact the cluster kube-master nodes, and
authenticate properly:
(metal-k8s) $ export KUBECONFIG=`pwd`/inventory/quickstart-cluster/artifacts/admin.conf
Now, assuming port 6443 on the first kube-master node is reachable from your system, we can e.g. list the nodes:
(metal-k8s) $ kubectl get nodes
NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION
node-01 Ready master,node 1m v1.9.5+coreos.0
node-02 Ready master,node 1m v1.9.5+coreos.0
node-03 Ready master,node 1m v1.9.5+coreos.0
or list all pods:
(metal-k8s) $ kubectl get pods --all-namespaces
NAMESPACE NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
kube-ingress nginx-ingress-controller-9d8jh 1/1 Running 0 1m
kube-ingress nginx-ingress-controller-d7vvg 1/1 Running 0 1m
kube-ingress nginx-ingress-controller-m8jpq 1/1 Running 0 1m
kube-ingress nginx-ingress-default-backend-6664bc64c9-xsws5 1/1 Running 0 1m
kube-ops alertmanager-kube-prometheus-0 2/2 Running 0 2m
kube-ops alertmanager-kube-prometheus-1 2/2 Running 0 2m
kube-ops es-client-7cf569f5d8-2z974 1/1 Running 0 2m
kube-ops es-client-7cf569f5d8-qq4h2 1/1 Running 0 2m
kube-ops es-data-cd5446fff-pkmhn 1/1 Running 0 2m
kube-ops es-data-cd5446fff-zzd2h 1/1 Running 0 2m
kube-ops es-exporter-elasticsearch-exporter-7df5bcf58b-k9fdd 1/1 Running 3 1m
...
Similarly, we can list all deployed Helm applications:
(metal-k8s) $ helm list
NAME REVISION UPDATED STATUS CHART NAMESPACE
es-exporter 3 Wed Apr 25 23:10:13 2018 DEPLOYED elasticsearch-exporter-0.1.2 kube-ops
fluentd 3 Wed Apr 25 23:09:59 2018 DEPLOYED fluentd-elasticsearch-0.1.4 kube-ops
heapster 3 Wed Apr 25 23:09:37 2018 DEPLOYED heapster-0.2.7 kube-system
kibana 3 Wed Apr 25 23:10:06 2018 DEPLOYED kibana-0.2.2 kube-ops
kube-prometheus 3 Wed Apr 25 23:09:22 2018 DEPLOYED kube-prometheus-0.0.33 kube-ops
nginx-ingress 3 Wed Apr 25 23:09:09 2018 DEPLOYED nginx-ingress-0.11.1 kube-ingress
prometheus-operator 3 Wed Apr 25 23:09:14 2018 DEPLOYED prometheus-operator-0.0.15 kube-ops
Cluster Services¶
Various services to operate and monitor your MetalK8s cluster are provided. To
access these, first create a secure tunnel into your cluster by running
kubectl proxy
. Then, while the tunnel is up and running, the following tools
are available:
Service | Role | Link | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
Kubernetes dashboard | A general purpose, web-based UI for Kubernetes clusters | http://localhost:8001/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/https:kubernetes-dashboard:/proxy/ | |
Grafana | Monitoring dashboards for cluster services | http://localhost:8001/api/v1/namespaces/kube-ops/services/kube-prometheus-grafana:http/proxy/ | |
Cerebro | An administration and monitoring console for Elasticsearch clusters | http://localhost:8001/api/v1/namespaces/kube-ops/services/cerebro:http/proxy/ | When accessing Cerebro, connect it to http://elasticsearch:9200 to operate the MetalK8s Elasticsearch cluster. |
Kibana | A search console for logs indexed in Elasticsearch | http://localhost:8001/api/v1/namespaces/kube-ops/services/http:kibana:/proxy/ | When accessing Kibana for the first
time, set up an index pattern for
the logstash-* index, using the
@timestamp field as Time Filter
field name. |
See Cluster Services for more information about these services and their configuration.