Internal communication between pods at Kubernetes with code - kubernetes

Maybe this question is very wrong but my research so far hasn't been very helpful.
My plan is to deploy a server app to multiple pods , as replicas (same code running in multiple pods) and I want each pod to be able to communicate with the rest pods.
More specifically I need to broadcast a message to all the rest pods every x minutes.
I cannot find examples of how I could do that with Python code or anything helpful related to the communication internally between the pods. I can see some instructions for the yaml configurations that I should use to make that possible , but no practical examples , which makes me think that maybe using Kubernetes is not the best technology service for what I am trying to do (?).
Any advice/suggestion/documentation is more than needed.
Thank you

Applications is typically deployed as Deployment to Kubernets, however in use-cases where you want stable network identity for your Pods, it is easier to deploy your app as StatefulSet.
When your app is deployed as StatefulSet the pods will be named e.g.: appname-0, appname-1, appname-2 if your StatefulSet is named appname and your replicas is replicas: 3
I cannot find examples of how I could do that with Python code
This is just plain network programming between the pods. You can use any UDP or TCP protocol, e.g. you can use http for this. The network address is the pod name (since your replicas are Pods within the same namespace) e.g. http://appname-0 or http://appname-1.

Related

Kubernetes external service faileover howto

I have two external AcriveMQ url, say mqA and mqB which are used by pod my-pod.
Both mqA and mqB are not in kubernetes cluster, and are not managed by me.
mqA is to be normally used, thus when its unavailable (0.1% probability) then mqB can be used.
Currently if mqA is broken then my-pod crashes and tries to restart.
For me, it's ok to restart the pod or some reasonable fowntime for switching.
So basically I'd like to have a kind of faileover for external service.
Is there a common approach for this in Kubernetes? Like an externalname would be fine. So when mqA is not pingable then it will switch externalName to mqB.
Unfortunately Kubernetes does not have native concept for running active-passive workloads. At this stage you will be better off having fail over at the client side or have some custom operator logic and proxy that will do the fail over for you.
Here's very good information that you may find interesting about active/standby proposal to kubernetes devs with some possible temporary solutions:
https://github.com/amelbakry/kubernetes-active-passive
https://github.com/andreykaipov/active-standby-controller
https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/45300#issuecomment-737658596

Communication between Pods in Kubernetes. Service object or Cluster Networking?

I'm a beginner in Kubernetes and I have a situation as following: I have two differents Pods: PodA and PodB. Firstly, I want to expose PodA to the outside world, so I create a Service (type NodePort or LoadBalancer) for PodA, which is not difficult to understand for me.
Then I want PodA communicate to PodB, and after several hours googling, I found the answer is that I also need to create a Service (type ClusterIP if I want to keep PodB only visible inside the cluster) for PodB, and if I do so, I can let PodA and PodB comminucate to each other. But the problem is I also found this article. According to this webpage, they say that the communication between pods on the same node can be done via cbr0, a Network Bridge, or the communication between pods on different nodes can be done via a route table of the cluster, and they don't mention anything to the Service object (which means we don't need Service object ???).
In fact, I also read the documents of K8s and I found in the Cluster Networking
Cluster Networking
...
2. Pod-to-Pod communications: this is the primary focus of this document.
...
where they also focus on to the Pod-to-Pod communications, but there is no stuff relevant to the Service object.
So, I'm really confusing right now and my question is: Could you please explain to me the connection between these stuff in the article and the Service object? The Service object is a high-level abstract of the cbr0 and route table? And in the end, how can the Pods can communicate to each other?
If I misunderstand something, please, point it out for me, I really appreciate that.
Thank you guys !!!
Motivation behind using a service in a Kubernetes cluster.
Kubernetes Pods are mortal. They are born and when they die, they are not resurrected. If you use a Deployment to run your app, it can create and destroy Pods dynamically.
Each Pod gets its own IP address, however in a Deployment, the set of Pods running in one moment in time could be different from the set of Pods running that application a moment later.
This leads to a problem: if some set of Pods (call them “backends”) provides functionality to other Pods (call them “frontends”) inside your cluster, how do the frontends find out and keep track of which IP address to connect to, so that the frontend can use the backend part of the workload?
That being said, a service is handy when your deployments (podA and podB) are dynamically managed.
Your PodA can always communicate with PodB if it knows the address or the DNS name of PodB. In a cluster environment, there may be multiple replicas of PodB, or an instance of PodB may die and be replaced by another instance with a different address and different name. A Service is an abstraction to deal with this situation. If you use a Service to expose your PodB, then all pods in the cluster can talk to an instance of PodB using that service, which has a fixed name and fixed address no matter how many instances of PodB exists and what their addresses are.
First, I read it as you are dealing with two applications, e.g. ApplicationA and ApplicationB. Don't use the Pod abstraction when you reason about your architecture. On Kubernetes, you are dealing with a distributed system, and it is designed so that you should have multiple instances of your Application, e.g. for High Availability. Each instance of your application is a Pod.
Deploy your applications ApplicationA and ApplicationB as a Deployment resource. Then it is easy do do rolling upgrades without downtime, and Kubernetes will restart any instance of your application if it crash.
For every Deployment or for you, application, create one Service resource, (e.g. ServiceA and ServiceB). When you communicate from ApplicationA to another application, use the Service, e.g. ServiceB. The service will load balance your requests to the instances of the other application, and you can upgrade your Deployment without downtime.
1.Cluster networking : As the name suggests, all the pods deployed in the cluster will be connected by implementing any kubernetes network model like DANM, flannel
Check this link to see how to create a cluster network.
Creating cluster network
With the CNI installed (by implementing cluster network), every pod will get an IP.
2.Service objects created with type ClusterIP, points to the this IPs (via endpoint) created internally to communicate.
Answering your question, Yes, The Service object is a high-level abstract of the cbr0 and route table.
You can use service object to communicate between pods.
You can also implement service mesh like envoy / Istio if the network is complex.

What exactly Kubernetes Services are and how they are different from Deployments

After reading thru Kubernetes documents like this, deployment , service and this I still do not have a clear idea what the purpose of service is.
It seems that the service is used for 2 purposes:
expose the deployment to the outside world (e.g using LoadBalancer),
expose one deployment to another deployment (e.g. using ClusterIP services).
Is this the case? And what about the Ingress?
------ update ------
Connect a Front End to a Back End Using a Service is a good example of the service working with the deployment.
Service
A deployment consists of one or more pods and replicas of pods. Let's say, we have 3 replicas of pods running in a deployment. Now let's assume there is no service. How does other pods in the cluster access these pods? Through IP addresses of these pods. What happens if we say one of the pods goes down. Kunernetes bring up another pod. Now the IP address list of these pods changes and all the other pods need to keep track of the same. The same is the case when there is auto scaling enabled. The number of the pods increases or decreases based on demand. To avoid this problem services come into play. Thus services are basically programs that manages the list of the pods ip for a deployment.
And yes, also regarding the uses that you posted in the question.
Ingress
Ingress is something that is used for providing a single point of entry for the various services in your cluster. Let's take a simple scenario. In your cluster there are two services. One for the web app and another for documentation service. If you are using services alone and not ingress, you need to maintain two load balancers. This might cost more as well. To avoid this, ingress when defined, sits on top of services and routes to services based on the rules and path defined in the ingress.

Why don't Kubernetes deployments support services?

I'm new to K8s, so still trying to get my head around things. I've been looking at deployments and can appreciate how useful they will be. However, I don't understand why they don't support services (only replica sets and pods).
Why is this? Does this mean that services would typically be deployed outside of a deployment?
To answer your question, Kubernetes deployments are used for managing stateless services running in the cluster instead of StatefulSets which are built for the stateful application run-time. Actually, with deployments you can describe the update strategy and road map for all underlying objects that have to be created during implementation.Therefore, we can distinguish separate specification fields for some objects determination, like needful replica number of Pods, template for Pod by describing a list of containers that should be in the Pod, etc.
However, as #P Ekambaram already mention in his answer, Services represent abstraction layer of network communication model inside Kubernetes cluster, and they declare a way to access Pods within a cluster via corresponded Endpoints. Services are separated from deployment object manifest specification, because of their mission to dynamically provide specific network behavior for the nested Pods without affecting or restarting them in case of any communication modification via appropriate Service Types.
Yes, services should be deployed as separate objects. Note that deployment is used to upgrade or rollback the image and works above ReplicaSet
Kubernetes Pods are mortal. They are born and when they die, they are not resurrected. ReplicaSets in particular create and destroy Pods dynamically (e.g. when scaling out or in). While each Pod gets its own IP address, even those IP addresses cannot be relied upon to be stable over time. This leads to a problem: if some set of Pods (let’s call them backends) provides functionality to other Pods (let’s call them frontends) inside the Kubernetes cluster, how do those frontends find out and keep track of which backends are in that set?
Services.come to the rescue.
A Kubernetes Service is an abstraction which defines a logical set of Pods and a policy by which to access them. The set of Pods targeted by a Service is (usually) determined by a Label Selector
Something I've just learnt that is somewhat related to my question: multiple K8s objects can be included in the same yaml file, separate by ---. Something like:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Deployment
# other stuff here
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
# other stuff here
i think it intends to decoupled and fine-grained.

Kubernetes - Load balancing Web App access per connections

Long time I did not come here and I hope you're fine :)
So for now, i have the pleasure of working with kubernetes ! So let's start ! :)
[THE EXISTING]
I have an operationnal kubernetes cluster with which I work every day.it consists of several applications, one of which is of particular interest to us, which is the web management interface.
I currently own one master and four nodes in my cluster.
For my web application, pod contain 3 containers : web / mongo /filebeat, and for technical reasons, we decided to assign 5 users max for each web pod.
[WHAT I WANT]
I want to deploy a web pod on each nodes (web0,web1,web2,web3), what I can already do, and that each session (1 session = 1 user) is distributed as follows:
For now, all HTTP requests are processed by web0.
[QUESTIONS]
Am I forced to go through an external loadbalancer (haproxy)?
Can I use an internal loadbalancer, configuring a service?
Does anyone have experience on the implementation described above?
I thank in advance those who can help me in this process :)
This generally depends how and where you've deployed your Kubernetes infrastructure, but you can do this natively with a few options.
Firstly, you'll need to scale your web deployment. This is very simple to do:
kubectl scale --current-replicas=2 --replicas=3 deployment/web
If you're deployed into a cloud provider (such as AWS using kops, or GKE) you can use a service. Just specify the type as LoadBalancer. Services will spread the sessions for your users.
Another option is to use an Ingress. In order to do this, you'll need to use an Ingress Controller, such as the nginx-ingress-controller which is the most featureful and widely deployed.
Both of these options will automatically loadbalance your incoming application sessions, but they may not necessarily do it in the order you've described in your image, it'll be random across the available web deployments