Connect to external database cluster from kubernetes - kubernetes

Is there option to connect to external database cluster from POD? I need to connect to elastic search, zookeeeper, Kafka and couchbase, each of them has its own cluster. Per my understanding the documentation, I can define multi external IPs, but I cannot find how will k8s behave if one of them is down. I am working with pure k8s 1.6 now, and we will migrate to 1.7 soon. Information about OpenShift 3.7 will be also welcome because I cannot find anything specific in its documentation.

The k8s doc on your link has more info on exposing services running on k8s but not externally
You generally want to expose your service using a DNS entry and manage the HA for that service separately.
For example you can a single DNS entry mykafka.mydomain.com and then assign IP addresses to that entry:
kafka1 ip
kafka2 ip
kafka3 ip
You can see that approach on the Openshift docs in the USING AN EXTERNAL DOMAIN NAME section. Yes, its not clear from the docs whether k8s/openshift does a round robin on the multiple IPs for an external service and if automatically fails over.
Hope it helps.

Related

Cross cluster communication in GKE Multi-cluster Service

I’m using GKE multi-cluster service and have configured two clusters.
On one cluster I have an endpoint I want to consume and it's hard-coded on address:
redpanda-0.redpanda.processing.svc.cluster.local.
Does anyone know how I can reach this from the other cluster?
EDIT:
I have exported the service, which is then automatically imported into the other cluster. Previously, I have been able to connect to the other cluster using SERVICE_EXPORT_NAME.NAMESPACE.svc.clusterset.local, but then I had to change the endpoint address manually to this exact address. In my new case, the endpoint address is not configurable.

Connect to Cassandra on Kubernetes using java-driver

We are bringing up a Cassandra cluster, using k8ssandra helm chart, it exposes several services, our client applications are using the datastax Java-Driver and running at the same k8s cluster as the Cassandra cluster (this is testing phase)
CqlSessionBuilder builder = CqlSession.builder();
What is the recommended way to connect the application (via the Driver) to Cassandra?
Adding all nodes?
for (String node :nodes) {
builder.addContactPoint(new InetSocketAddress(node, 9042));
}
Adding just the service address?
builder.addContactPoint(new InetSocketAddress(service-dns-name , 9042))
Adding the service address as unresolved? (would that even work?)
builder.addContactPoint(InetSocketAddress.createUnresolved(service-dns-name , 9042))
The k8ssandra Helm chart deploys a CassandraDatacenter object and cass-operator in addition to a number of other resources. cass-operator is responsible for managing the CassandraDatacenter. It creates the StatefulSet(s) and creates several headless services including:
datacenter service
seeds service
all pods service
The seeds service only resolves to pods that are seeds. Its name is of the form <cluster-name>-seed-service. Because of the ephemeral nature of pods cass-operator may designate different C* nodes as seed nodes. Do not use the seed service for connecting client applications.
The all pods service resolves to all Cassandra pods, regardless of whether they are readiness. Its name is of the form <cluster-name>-<dc-name>-all-pods-service. This service is intended to facilitate with monitoring. Do not use the all pods service for connecting client applications.
The datacenter service resolves to ready pods. Its name is of the form <cluster-name>-<dc-name>-service This is the service that you should use for connecting client applications. Do not directly use pod IPs as they will change over time.
Adding all nodes?
You definitely do not need to add all of the nodes as contact points. Even in vanilla Cassandra, only adding a few is fine as the driver will gossip and find the rest.
Adding just the service address?
Your second option of binding on the service address is all you should need to do. The nice thing about the service address, is that it will account for changing/removing of IPs in the cluster.

how to connect to k8s cluster with bitnami postgresql-ha deployed?

My setup (running locally in two minikubes) is I have two k8s clusters:
frontend cluster is running a golang api-server,
backend cluster is running an ha bitnami postgres cluster (used bitnami postgresql-ha chart for this)
Although if i set the pgpool service to use nodeport and i get the ip + port for the node that the pgpool pod is running on i can hardwire this (host + port) to my database connector in the api-server (in the other cluster) this works.
However what i haven't been able to figure out is how to generically connect to the other cluster (e.g. to pgpool) without using the ip address?
I also tried using Skupper, which also has an example of connecting to a backend cluster with postgres running on it, but their example doesn't use bitnami ha postgres helm chart, just a simple postgres install, so it is not at all the same.
Any ideas?
For those times when you have to, or purposely want to, connect pods/deployments across multiple clusters, Nethopper (https://www.nethopper.io/) is a simple and secure solution. The postgresql-ha scenario above is covered under their free tier. There is a two cluster minikube 'how to' tutorial at https://www.nethopper.io/connect2clusters which is very similar to your frontend/backend use case. Nethopper is based on skupper.io, but the configuration is much easier and user friendly, and is centralized so it scales to many clusters if you need to.
To solve your specific use case, you would:
First install your api server in the frontend and your bitnami postgresql-ha chart in the backend, as you normally would.
Go to https://mynethopper.com/ and
Register
Clouds -> define both clusters (clouds), frontend and backend
Application Network -> create an application network
Application Network -> attach both clusters to the network
Application Network -> install nethopper-agent in each cluster with copy paste instructions.
Objects -> import and expose pgpool (call the service 'pgpool') in your backend.
Objects -> distribute the service 'pgpool' to frontend, using a distribution rule.
Now, you should see 'pgpool' service in the frontend cluster
kubectl get service
When the API server pods in the frontend request service from pgpool, they will connect to pgpool in the backend, magically. It's like the 'pgpool' pod is now running in the frontend.
The nethopper part should only take 5-10 minutes, and you do NOT need IP addresses, TLS certs, K8s ingresses or loadbalancers, a VPN, or an istio service mesh or sidecars.
After moving to the one cluster architecture, it became easier to see how to connect to the bitnami postgres-ha cluster, by trying a few different things finally this worked:
-postgresql-ha-postgresql-headless:5432
(that's the host and port I'm using to call from my golang server)
Now i believe it should be fairly straightforward to also run the two cluster case using skupper to bind to the headless service.

How to install Kubernetes dashboard on external IP address?

How to install Kubernetes dashboard on external IP address?
Is there any tutorial for this?
You can expose services and pods in several ways:
expose the internal ClusterIP service through Ingress, if you have that set up.
change the service type to use 'type: LoadBalancer', which will try to create an external load balancer.
If you have external IP addresses on your kubernetes nodes, you can also expose the ports directly on the node hosts; however, I would avoid these unless it's a small, test cluster.
change the service type to 'type: NodePort', which will utilize a port above 30000 on all cluster machines.
expose the pod directly using 'type: HostPort' in the pod spec.
Depending on your cluster type (Kops-created, GKE, EKS, AKS and so on), different variants may not be setup. Hosted clusters typically support and recommend LoadBalancers, which they charge for, but may or may not have support for NodePort/HostPort.
Another, more important note is that you must ensure you protect the dashboard. Running an unprotected dashboard is a sure way of getting your cluster compromised; this recently happened to Tesla. A decent writeup on various way to protect yourself was written by Jo Beda of Heptio

OpenShift and hostnetwork=true

I have deployed two POD-s with hostnetwork set to true. When the POD-s are deployed on same OpenShfit node then everything works fine since they can discover each other using node IP.
When the POD-s are deployed on different OpenShift nodes then they cant discover each other, I get no route to host if I want to point one POD to another using node IP. How to fix this?
The uswitch/kiam (https://github.com/uswitch/kiam) service is a good example of a use case.
it has an agent process that runs on the hostnetwork of all worker nodes because it modifies a firewall rule to intercept API requests (from containers running on the host) to the AWS api.
it also has a server process that runs on the hostnetwork to access the AWS api since the AWS api is on a subnet that is only available to the host network.
finally... the agent talks to the server using GRPC which connects directly to one of the IP addresses that are returned when looking up the kiam-server.
so you have pods of the agent deployment running on the hostnetwork of node A trying to connect to kiam server running on the hostnetwork of node B.... which just does not work.
furthermore, this is a private service... it should not be available from outside the network.
If you want the two containers to be share the same physical machine and take advantage of loopback for quick communications, then you would be better off defining them together as a single Pod with two containers.
If the two containers are meant to float over a larger cluster and be more loosely coupled, then I'd recommend taking advantage of the Service construct within Kubernetes (under OpenShift) and using that for the appropriate discovery.
Services are documented at https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/service/, and along with an internal DNS service (if implemented - common in Kubernetes 1.4 and later) they provide a means to let Kubernetes manage where things are, updating an internal DNS entry in the form of <servicename>.<namespace>.svc.cluster.local. So for example, if you set up a Pod with a service named "backend" in the default namespace, the other Pod could reference it as backend.default.svc.cluster.local. The Kubernetes documentation on the DNS portion of this is available at https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/dns-pod-service/
This also avoids the "hostnetwork=true" complication, and lets OpenShift (or specifically Kubernetes) manage the networking.
If you have to absolutely use hostnetwork, you should be creating router and then use those routers to have the communication between pods. You can create ha proxy based router in opeshift, reference here --https://docs.openshift.com/enterprise/3.0/install_config/install/deploy_router.html