How to use helm chart test to do integration tests? - kubernetes

I am trying to use it to run some integration tests, so to verify the service code I am deploying is actually doing the right thing.
Basically how I setup is (as described here: https://docs.helm.sh/developing_charts/#chart-tests) creating this templates/tests/integration-test.yaml chart test file, and inside it specify to run a container, which basically is a customized maven image with test code added in and the test container is simply started by command “mvn test”, which does some simple curl check on the kube service this whole helm release deploys.
In this way, the helm test does work.
However, the issue is, during the helm test is running, the new version of the service code is actually already online and being exposed to the outside world/users. I can of course immediately do a roll back if the helm test fails, but this will not stop me hosting the problem-version of the service code for a while to the outside world.
Is there a way, where one can run a service/integration test on a pod, after the pod is started but before it is exposed to the Kubernetes service?

Ideally you'll install and test on a test environment first, either a dedicated test cluster or namepsace. For an additional check you could install the chart first into a new namespace and let the tests run there and then delete that namespace when it is all passed. This does require writing the tests in a way that they can hit URLs that are specific to that namespace. Cluster-internal URLs based on service names will be namespace-relative anyway but if you use external URLs in the tests then you'd either need to switch them to internal or use prefixing.

Use the readiness and liveness probes in the pod spec to ensure that the deployment won't even roll out if there are probe failures.

Related

Initcontainer vs Helm Hook post-install

What is a difference between Helm Hooks post-install and Kubernetes initcontainers? What I am understood is that Hooks are used to define some actions during different stages of Pod lifecycle, in that case - post-install, and initcontainers, on the other hand, allow to initialize the container before it is deployed to Pod.
post-install and initcontainer as I understand allow to do the same thing, i.e. initialize a database.
Is that correct? Which is the better approach?
For database setup I would prefer a Helm hook, but even then there are some subtleties.
Say your service is running as a Deployment with replicas: 3 for a little bit of redundancy. Every one of these replicas will run an init container, if it's specified in the pod spec, without any sort of synchronization. If one of the pods crashes, or its node fails, its replacement will run the init container again. For the sort of setup task you're talking about, you don't want to repeat it that often.
The fundamental difference here is that a Helm hook is a separate Kubernetes object, typically a Job. You can arrange for this Job to be run exactly once on each helm upgrade and at no other times, which makes it a reasonable place to run things like migrations.
The one important subtlety here is that you can have multiple versions of a service running at once. Take the preceding Deployment with replicas: 3, but then helm upgrade --set tag=something-newer. The Deployment controller will first start a new pod with the new image, and only once it's up and running will it tear down an old pod, and now you have both versions going together. Similar things will happen if you helm rollback to an older version. This means you need some tolerance for the database not quite having the right schema.
If the job is more like a "seed" job that preloads some initial data, this is easier to manage: do it in a post-install hook, which you expect to run only once ever. You don't need to repeat it on every upgrade (as a post-upgrade hook) or on every pod start (as an init container).
Helm install hook and initcontainer are fundamentally different.Install hooks in helm creates a completely separate pod altogether which means that pod will not have access to main pods directly using localhost or they cannot use same volume mount etc while initcontainer can do so.
Init container which is comparable to helm pre install hooks is limited in way because it can only do initial tasks before the main pod is started and can not do any tasks which need to be executed after the pod is started for example any clean up activity.
Initialization of DB etc needs to be done before the actual container is started and I think initcontainer is sufficient enough for this use case but a helm pre install hook can also be used.
You need to use post hook, since first you have to create a db pod and then initialize db. You will notice that a pod for post hook comes up after the db pod starts running. The post hook pod will be removed after the hook is executed.

How to run a script in a pod once, manually, using helm

I'm looking for the correct way to run a one-time maintenance script on my Kubernetes cluster.
I've got my deployment configured via Helm, so everything is bundled in my chart and works extremely well from an automation point of view.
Problem is running a script just once. I know Helm has hooks, but I don't think those can be configured to run manually (only pre/post upgrade/install etc.). This is compared to running kubectl apply -f my-maintenance-script.yaml, which I can do just once and be done with.
Is there a best-practice way of doing this? I want to be able to use Helm since I can feed all my config/template values into the Job.
You can use Kubernetes Job, and use helm test to run the Job.

Deleting kubernetes yaml: how to prevent old objects from floating around?

i'm working on a continuous deployment routine for a kubernetes application: everytime i push a git tag, a github action is activated which calls kubectl apply -f kubernetes to apply a bunch of yaml kubernetes definitions
let's say i add yaml for a new service, and deploy it -- kubectl will add it
but then later on, i simply delete the yaml for that service, and redeploy -- kubectl will NOT delete it
is there any way that kubectl can recognize that the service yaml is missing, and respond by deleting the service automatically during continuous deployment? in my local test, the service remains floating around
does the developer have to know to connect kubectl to the production cluster and delete the service manually, in addition to deleting the yaml definition?
is there a mechanism for kubernetes to "know what's missing"?
You need to use a CI/CD tool for Kubernetes to achieve what you need. As mentioned by Sithroo Helm is a very good option.
Helm lets you fetch, deploy and manage the lifecycle of applications,
both 3rd party products and your own.
No more maintaining random groups of YAML files (or very long ones)
describing pods, replica sets, services, RBAC settings, etc. With
helm, there is a structure and a convention for a software package
that defines a layer of YAML templates and another layer that
changes the templates called values. Values are injected into
templates, thus allowing a separation of configuration, and defines
where changes are allowed. This whole package is called a Helm
Chart.
Essentially you create structured application packages that contain
everything they need to run on a Kubernetes cluster; including
dependencies the application requires. Source
Before you start, I recommend you these articles explaining it's quirks and features.
The missing CI/CD Kubernetes component: Helm package manager
Continuous Integration & Delivery (CI/CD) for Kubernetes Using CircleCI & Helm
There's no such way. You can deploy resources from yaml file from anywhere if you can reach the node and configure kube config. So kubernetes will not know how to respond on a file deletion. If you still want to do this, you can write a program (a go code) which checks the availability of files in one place and deletes the corresponding resource whenever the file gets deleted.
There's one way via kubernetes is by using kubernetes operator, and whenever there is any change in your files you can update the crd used to deploy resources via operator.
Before deleting the yaml file, you can run kubectl delete -f file.yaml, this way all the resources created by this file will be deleted.
However, what you are looking for, is achieving the desired state using k8s. You can do this by using tools like Helmfile.
Helmfile, allow you to specify the resources you want to have all in one file, and it will achieve the desired state every time you run helmfile apply

Deploy a scalable application on Kubernetes which requires each replica Pod to have different args

I am trying to understand how to deploy an application on Kubernetes which requires each Pod of the same deployment to have different args used with the starting command.
I have this application which runs spark on Kubernetes and needs to spawn executor Pods on start. The problem is that each Pod of the application needs to spawn its own executors using its own port and spark app name.
I've read of stateful sets and searched the documentation but I didn't found a solution to my problem. Since every Pod needs to use a different port, I need that port to be declared in a service if I understood correctly, and also directly passed as an argument to the pod command in the args.
Is there a way to obtain this without using multiple deployments, one for each pod I need to create? Because this is the only solution i can think of but it can't be scaled after being deployed.
I'm using Helm to deploy the application, so I can easily create as many deployments and / or services as needed, but I would like to find a solution which can scale at runtime, if possible.
I don't think you can have a Deployment which creates PODs from different Specs. You can't have it in Kubernetes and Helm won't help here (since Helm is just a template manager over Kubernetes configurations).
What you can do is to specify each Pod as a separate configuration (if single Pod, you don't necessarily need Deployment) and let Helm manage it.
Posting the solution I used since it could be useful for other people searching around.
In the end I found a great configuration to solve my problem. I used a StatefulSet to declare the deployment of the Spark application. Associated with the StatefulSet, a headless Service which expose each pod on a specific port.
StatefulSet can declare a property spec.serviceName which can have the same name of a headless service to create a unique network name for each Pod. Something like <pod_name>.<service_name>
Additionally, each Pod has a unique and not-changing name which is created using the application name and an ordinal starting from 0 for each replica Pod.
Using a starting script in the docker image and inserting in the environment of each Pod the pod name from the metadata, I was able to use different configurations for each pod since, even with the same deployment, each pod have their own unique metadata name and I can use the StatefulSet service to obtain what I needed.
This way, the StatefulSet is scalable at run time and works as expected.
hey I am not sure if this will exactly match your scenario but I think this is what you can try. Use a sidecar container to run the replica instances, A sidecar is a container which runs along with the main container and also shares the same namespace and can share volumes across each container.
Now to pass the different arguments to each container or sidecar, you will have to tweak the dockerfile or rather tweak the way your container starts.
Create a start.sh script file which accepts the arguments and starts the container with those arguments, the trick here is to accept the argument from environment variables thus allowing you to later configure these from configmaps or pod env.
So here is an example of php/laravel application running the same code and starting with different arguments. And the start.sh the file looks like this.
#!/bin/sh
if [ "${CONTAINER_ROLE}" = "queue" ];
then
echo "Running the queue..."
php artisan queue:work --queue=${QUEUENAME}
echo "Queue Started"
else
echo "Running Iceberg."
exec apache2-foreground
fi
So a sample dockerfile looks like this
FROM php:7.1.24-apache
COPY . /srv/myapp
...
...
RUN chown -R www-data:www-data /srv/app \
&& a2enmod remoteip && a2enmod rewrite
WORKDIR /srv/app
RUN chmod +x .docker/start.sh
CMD [ "sh",".docker/start.sh"]
Let me know how it goes.

Openshift deployment validation - QA

wanted to know if there's any tool that can validate an openshift deployment. Let's say you have a deploy configuration file with different features (secrets, routes, services, environment variables, etc) and I want to validate after the deployment has finished and the POD/s is/are created in Openshift, that all those things are there as requested on the file. Like a tool for QA.
thanks
Readiness probe are there which can execute http requests on the pod to confirm its availability. Also it can execute commands to confirm desired resources are available within the container.
Readiness probe
There is a particular flag --dry-run in Kubernetes for resource creation which performs basic syntax verification and template object schema validation without real object implementation, therefore you can do the test for all underlying objects defined in the deployment manifest file.
I think it is also feasible to achieve through OpenShift client:
$ oc create -f deployment-app.yaml --dry-run
or
$ oc apply -f deployment-app.yaml --dry-run
You can find some useful OpenShift client commands in Developer CLI Operations documentation page.
For one time validation, you can create a Job (OpenShift) with Init Container (OpenShift) that ensures that all deployment process is done, and then run test/shell script with sequence of kubectl/curl/other commands to ensure that every piece of deployment are in place and in desired state.
For continuous validation, you can create a CronJob (OpenShift) that will periodically create a test Job and report the result somewhere.
This answer can help you to create all that stuff.