Multiple pods using same database on kubernetes - kubernetes

I would like to know if it is possible for multiple pods in the same Kubernetes cluster to access a database which is configured using persistent volumes on a Google cloud persistent disk.
Currently I am building a microservices achitecture web app which has 3 node apis in different pods all accessing the same database. So how do I achieve this with kubernetes.
Kindly let me know if my architecture is right as well

You can certainly connect multiple node-based app pods to the same database. It is sometimes said that microservices shouldn't share a database but this depends on what your apps are doing, the project history and the extent to which you want the parts to be worked on separately.
There are questions you have to answer about running databases at scale, such as your future load and whether you want to use relational databases if you're going to try to span availability zones. And there are
some specific to kubernetes, especially around how you associate DB Pods to data. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/53980021/9705485. Another popular option is to use a managed DB service from a cloud provider. If you do run the DB in k8s then I'd suggest looking for a helm chart or looking at an operator, such as the kubeDB operator, to avoid crafting the kubernetes descriptors yourself and to get more guidance on running the DB and setting it up.
If it's a new project and you've not used k8s before then you'll also have to decide where to host your code, your docker images and your deployment descriptors and how to setup your CI pipelines. If you've not got answers to these questions already then I'd suggest looking at Jenkins-X as it will provide you with out of the box defaults for a whole cluster and CI setup and a template ('build pack') for building node apps and deploying them to staging and prod environments through a pipeline.

Related

Good solutions to automate infrastructure deployment locally?

I have recently been reading more about infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) and had some questions. I see when we opt for a PaaS solution, it is generally very easy to create the infrastructure as the cloud providers handle that for us and we can even automate the deployment using an infrastructure as code solution like Terraform.
But if we use an IaaS solution or even a local on premise cluster, we lose a lot of the automation it seems that PaaS allows. So I was curious, are there any good tools out there for automating infrastructure deployment on a local cluster that is not in the cloud?
The best thing I could think of was to run a local Kubernetes cluster and then Dockerize each of the infrastructure components, but this seems difficult as each node in the cluster will need its own specific configuration files.
From my basic Googling, it seems like there is not a good solution to this.
Edit:
I was not clear enough with my original intentions. I have two problems I am trying to solve.
How do I automate infrastructure deployment locally? For example, suppose I wanted to create a Hadoop HDFS cluster. I would need to configure one node to be the namenode with an accessible IP, and the other nodes to be datanodes that are aware of the namenode's IP. At the moment, I have to do this manually by logging into each node, checking it's IP, and then configuring each one. How would I automate this? If I were to use a Kubernetes approach, how do I specify that one of the running pods needs to be the namenode and the others are datanodes? How do I find the pods' IPs and have them be aware of the namenode IP?
The next problem I have is very similar to the first, but a slight modification. How would I deploy specific configuration files to each node. For instance in Kafka, the configuration file for one node, requires the IPs of the Zookeeper nodes, as well as the IP it should listen on. This may be different for every node in the cluster. Is there a good way to make these config files pod specific, so that I do not have to do bash text processing to insert the correct contents into each pod's config files?
You can use Terraform for all of your on-premise Infra. Automation, and Ansible for configuration management.
Let's say you have three HPE servers, Install K8s or VMware on them using Ansible, then you can treat them as three Avvaliabilty zones in one region, same as AWS. from this you can start deploying dockerize apps, or helm charts using Terraform.
Summary:
Ansbile for installing and configuration K8s.
Terraform for provisioning K8s.
Helm for installing apps on K8s.
After this you gonna have a base automated on-premise Infra.

Application Load Balancers in an EKS cluster

I'm trying to figure out ways to automate k8s deployments in an EKS cluster. I'm trying to set up namespaces for each specific environment. One for dev, one for staging, and one for production. My production namespace is in a separate region and also in a separate cluster (dev & staging are in one cluster). I'm a little new to this concept, but does it make sense to have each respective application load balancer in it's respective namespace? Is that practice common or best practice? Any ideas on automating deployments would be appreciated.
Hi Dave Michaels,
I assume there are two questions in your post above:
If we use a dedicated namespace in the same cluster (dev & staging setup), can we use a dedicated load balancer for each of these namespaces? Is this good practice.
Answer: Yes. As you are using the namespace concept for each environment in the same cluster, it is Ok to create a dedicated load balancer (promise me you will use ingress :)) in each of these namespaces as we need an easier way to access those environments. To be frank, I am not a fan of using namespaces for environments, because as your cluster grows and lots of microservices getting added to it, you might want to use namespace for another reason eg., namespace per team or domain to have granular access rights. But I have seen teams using it for different environments successfully as well.
Suggest automated Kubernetes deployments possibilities?
This is a large topic by itself.
As your microservices grow, you will have multiple Kubernetes manifests to handle, first thing I will suggest is to either use a configuration manager like Kustomize or a package manager like Helm to segregate variables from actual manifests, this will help to easily automate deployment across environments (same cluster or different clusters). Coming to actual deployment automation, if there is no existing CD in place I would suggest exploring tools that support natively Kubernetes that supports GitOps, like FluxCD or ArgoCD etc

Kubernetes Cluster - How to automatically generate documentation/Architecture of services

We started using Kubernetes, a few time ago, and now we have deployed a fair amount of services. It's becoming more and more difficult to know exactly what is deployed. I suppose many people are facing the same issue, so is there already a solution to handle this issue?
I'm talking of a solution that when connected to kubernetes (via kubectl for example) can generate a kind of map off the cluster.
In order to display one or many resources you need to use kubectl get command.
To show details of a specific resource or group of resources you can use kubectl describe command.
Please check the links I provided for more details and examples.
You may also want to use Web UI (Dashboard)
Dashboard is a web-based Kubernetes user interface. You can use
Dashboard to deploy containerized applications to a Kubernetes
cluster, troubleshoot your containerized application, and manage the
cluster resources. You can use Dashboard to get an overview of
applications running on your cluster, as well as for creating or
modifying individual Kubernetes resources (such as Deployments, Jobs,
DaemonSets, etc). For example, you can scale a Deployment, initiate a
rolling update, restart a pod or deploy new applications using a
deploy wizard.
Let me know if that helped.

When using Kubernetes Do i need to still use Containers for Oracle?

When using Rubbernecks do I need to still use Containers for Oracle?
Here is my case, I am designing microservice architecture for my application using kubernetes.
I have deployed all my front-end, middleware and back-end services in different containers.
But for the data layer, I am not sure is it the right way to deploy Oracle in a container, as the database cannot be scaled horizontally. And if I want to scale the data container vertically in Kubernetes, How can I do that?
Generally how this is handled in the Kubernetes world?
You really need to come to terms with what you want/expect.
You can run a database on kube, specialy since StatefulSets. You might want to look into PersistentVolumes and PersistentVolumeClaims as well.
You can connect from kube services to an off cluster database managed in traditional way.
Which way you choose depends largely on what are you projects constraints and team experience or expected solution portability between envs and level of automation you want/have around it.

Clusters and nodes formation in Kubernetes

I am trying to deploy my Docker images using Kubernetes orchestration tools.When I am reading about Kubernetes, I am seeing documentation and many YouTube video tutorial of working with Kubernetes. In there I only found that creation of pods, services and creation of that .yml files. Here I have doubts and I am adding below section,
When I am using Kubernetes, how I can create clusters and nodes ?
Can I deploy my current docker-compose build image directly using pods only? Why I need to create services yml file?
I new to containerizing, Docker and Kubernetes world.
My favorite way to create clusters is kubespray because I find ansible very easy to read and troubleshoot, unlike more monolithic "run this binary" mechanisms for creating clusters. The kubespray repo has a vagrant configuration file, so you can even try out a full cluster on your local machine, to see what it will do "for real"
But with the popularity of kubernetes, I'd bet if you ask 5 people you'll get 10 answers to that question, so ultimately pick the one you find easiest to reason about, because almost without fail you will need to debug those mechanisms when something inevitably goes wrong
The short version, as Hitesh said, is "yes," but the long version is that one will need to be careful because local docker containers and kubernetes clusters are trying to solve different problems, and (as a general rule) one could not easily swap one in place of the other.
As for the second part of your question, a Service in kubernetes is designed to decouple the current provider of some networked functionality from the long-lived "promise" that such functionality will exist and work. That's because in kubernetes, the Pods (and Nodes, for that matter) are disposable and subject to termination at almost any time. It would be severely problematic if the consumer of a networked service needed to constantly update its IP address/ports/etc to account for the coming-and-going of Pods. This is actually the exact same problem that AWS's Elastic Load Balancers are trying to solve, and kubernetes will cheerfully provision an ELB to represent a Service if you indicate that is what you would like (and similar behavior for other cloud providers)
If you are not yet comfortable with containers and docker as concepts, then I would strongly recommend starting with those topics, and moving on to understanding how kubernetes interacts with those two things after you have a solid foundation. Else, a lot of the terminology -- and even the problems kubernetes is trying to solve -- may continue to seem opaque