Feasibility of using multi master Kubernetes cluster architecture - kubernetes

I am trying to implement CI/CD pipeline using Kubernetes and Jenkins. In my application I have 25 Micro services. And need to deploy it for 5 different clients. The microservice code is unique. But configuration for each client is different.
So here I am configuring Spring cloud config server with 5 different Profiles/Configuration. And When I am building Docker images, I will define which is the active config server profile by adding active profile in Docker file. So from 25 microservices I am building 25 * 5 number of Docker images and deploying that. So total 125 microservices I need to deploy in Kubernetes cluster. And these microservice are calling from my Angular 2 front end application.
Here when I am considering the performance of application and speed of response, the single master is enough of this application architecture? Or Should I definitely need to use the multi master Kubernetes cluster? How I can manage this application?
I am new to these cloud and CI/CD pipeline architecture tasks. So I have confusion related with designing of workflow. If single master is enough, then I can continue with current. Otherwise I need to implement the multi master Kubernetes HA cluster.

The performance of the application and/or the speed do not depend on the number of master nodes. It resolves High Availability issues, but not performance. Now, you should still consider having at least 3 masters for this implementation you are working on. If the master goes down, your cluster is useless.
In Kubernetes, the master gets the API calls and acts upon them, by setting the desired state of the cluster to the current state. But in the end that's the nodes (slaves) doing the heavy work. So your performance issues will depend mostly, if not exclusively, on your nodes. If you have enough memory and CPU, you should be fine.

Multi master sounds like a good idea for HA.
You could also look at using Helm which lets you configure microservices in a per installation basis so that you don't have to keep re-releasing docker images each time to configure a new environment. You can then inject the helm configuration into, say, a ConfigMap that mounts the content as an application.yml so that Spring Boot automatically loads the settings

Related

High Available Kubernetes cluster

We are starting migrating our system from Azure web app services to AKS infrastructure and currently we had an incident with our test cluster and connection to all our environments were lost. It was due to the upgrading version of Kubernetes and adding additional node pool which broke the route table and they lost communication between themselves.
So as a result we came up with the next HA infrastructure for our environments:
But that eventually adds more work on the CI/CD pipelines and doesn't look very logically as Kubernetes itself should be reliable.
Can I have your comments and thoughts if it is best practice or proper way of moving forward?

Triggering a Kubernetes-based application from AppEngine

I'm currently looking into triggering some 3D rendering from an AppEngine-based service.
The idea is that input data is submitted by an API client to this web service, which then invokes an internal Kubernetes GPU enabled application ("rendering backend") to do the hard work.
GPU-enabled clusters are relatively expensive ($$$), so I really want the cluster to be up and running on demand. I am trying to achieve that by setting the autoscaling minimum to 0 for the rendering backend.
The only pretty way of "triggering" a rendering task on such a cluster I could think of is via Pub/Sub Push. Basically, I need something like Cloud Tasks, but those seem to be aimed at long running tasks executed in AppEngine, not Kubernetes. Plus I like the way Pub/Sub decouples the web service from the rendering backend.
Google's Pub/Sub only allows pushing via HTTPS and only to a validated domain. It appears that Google is forcing me to completely "expose" my internal rendering backend by assigning a domain name to it, which feels ridiculous. I cannot just tell Pub/Sub to invoke http://loadbalancer.IP.address/handle_push.
This is making me doubt my architecture.
How would you go about building something like this on GCP?
From the GKE perspective:
You can have a cluster with a dedicated GPU-based nodepool and schedule your pods there using Taints and tolerations. Additionally, you can control the number of nodes in your nodepool using Autoscaling so that, you can use them only when your pods are to be scheduled/run.
Consider that this requires an additional default-non-GPU-based nodepool, where system pods are being run.
For triggering, as long as your default pool is running, you'd be able to deploy your application and the autoscaling should start automatically. For deploying from an App Engine application, you might want to consider talking to the Kubernetes API directly through a library.
Finally and considering the nature of your current goal (3D rendering), it might be best to use Kubernetes Jobs. With these, you can complete an sporadic computational load, allowing the nodepool to downsize once is finished.
Wrapping up, you can have a minimum cluster with a zero-sized GPU-based nodepool that will autoscale when a tainted job is requested to be run there, and once the workload is finished, it should automatically downscale. These actions can be triggered from GAE, using one of the client libraries.

Kubernetes - Single Cluster or Multiple Clusters

I'm migrating a number of applications from AWS ECS to Azure AKS and being the first production deployment for me in Kubernetes I'd like to ensure that it's set up correctly from the off.
The applications being moved all use resources at varying degrees with some being more memory intensive and others being more CPU intensive, and all running at different scales.
After some research, I'm not sure which would be the best approach out of running a single large cluster and running them all in their own Namespace, or running a single cluster per application with Federation.
I should note that I'll need to monitor resource usage per application for cost management (amongst other things), and communication is needed between most of the applications.
I'm able to set up both layouts and I'm sure both would work, but I'm not sure of the pros and cons of each approach, whether I should be avoiding one altogether, or whether I should be considering other options?
Because you are at the beginning of your kubernetes journey I would go with separate clusters for each stage you have (or at least separate dev and prod). You can very easily take your cluster down (I did it several times with resource starvation). Also not setting correctly those network policies you might find that services from different stages/namespaces (like test and sandbox) communicate with each other. Or pipelines that should deploy dev to change something in other namespace.
Why risk production being affected by dev work?
Even if you don't have to upgrade the control plane yourself, aks still has its versions and flags and it is better to test them before moving to production on a separate cluster.
So my initial decision would be to set some hard boundaries: different clusters. Later once you get more knowledge with aks and kubernetes you can review your decision.
As you said that communication is need among the applications I suggest you go with one cluster. Application isolation can be achieved by Deploying each application in a separate namespace. You can collect metrics at namespace level and can set resources quota at namespace level. That way you can take action at application level
A single cluster (with namespaces and RBAC) is easier to setup and manage. A single k8s cluster does support high load.
If you really want multiple clusters, you could try istio multi-cluster (istio service mesh for multiple cluster) too.
Depends... Be aware AKS still doesn't support multiple node pools (On the short-term roadmap), so you'll need to run those workloads in single pool VM type. Also when thinking about multiple clusters, think about multi-tenancy requirements and the blast radius of a single cluster. I typically see users deploying multiple clusters even though there is some management overhead, but good SCM and configuration management practices can help with this overhead.

Azure Service Fabric - connect to local service fabric cluster from outside the VM it's running on?

We have a 5-node Azure Service Fabric Cluster as our main Production microservices hub. Up until now, for testing purposes, we've just been pushing out separate versions of our applications (the production application with ".Test" appended to the name) to that production SFC.
We're looking for a better approach, namely a separate test Service Fabric Cluster. But the issue comes down to costs. The smallest SFC you can create in Azure is 3 nodes. Further, you can't shutdown a SFC when it's not being used, which we would also need to do to save on costs.
So now I'm looking at just spinning up a plain Windows VM in Azure and installing the local Service Fabric Cluster app (which allows just one-node setup). Is it possible to do this and be able to communicate with the cluster from outside the VM?
What you are trying to accomplish is setup a standalone cluster. The steps to do it is documented in this docs.
Yes, you can access the cluster from outside the VM, In simple terms enable access to the network and open the firewall ports.
Technically both deployments(Guide and DevCluster) are very similar, the main difference is that you have better control on the templates following the standalone guide, using the development setup you don't have much options and all the process is automated.
PS: I would highly recommend you have a UAT\Staging cluster with the
exact same specs as the production version, the approach you used
could be a good idea for staging environment. Having different
environments increase the risk of issues, mainly related to
configuration and concurrency.

How to deploy multi - tier application with Kubernetes

If I have a multi - tier application (say web / logic / database), where each tier having it's own container, and I need to deploy all of these en - bloc, do they all have to go into the same pod?
And if they are in the same pod, does this have any implications in terms of the maximum size of application that can be run?
Or is there some higher level abstraction that I can use to start all three layers, but have them running on different minions?
Why do you need to deploy all of the components together? In a micro services architecture, you would want to reduce the dependencies between each layer to a clean interface and then allow each layer to be deployed and scaled separately from the others.
If you need to deploy them together (e.g. they share local disk or localhost networking) then you need to deploy them as a single pod. A single pod is an atomic scheduling unit, so it will be deployed onto a single host machine. Since it lands on a single host, this limits the scalability of your application to the size of a single host (not allowing you to scale out as your traffic increases).
If your three layers are not tightly coupled, then you can run them in different pods, which allows them to be scheduled across multiple hosts (or on the same host if, for example, you are doing local development). To connect the pods together, you can define services.
You should take a look at the guestbook example which illustrates how to define pods and services for a simple multi-tier web application running on Kubernetes.