Deployments not visible in Kubernetes Dashboard - kubernetes

I've created a deployment like this:
kubectl run my-app --image=ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/my-app:v1 -l name=my-app --replicas=1
Now I goto the Kubernetes Dashboard:
https://172.0.0.1/api/v1/proxy/namespaces/kube-system/services/kubernetes-dashboard
But I dont see my-app listed here.
Is it possible to use the Kubernetes Dashboard to view deployments? I'd like to use the dashboard to do things like view the deployments mem/cpu usage, check logs, etc

Kubernetes Dashboard is pretty limited at the moment, and only supports ReplicationControllers. If you create a ReplicationController then you will be able to see the Pods connected to it, check their memory and CPU usage, and view their logs.
Work is being done to improve Dashboard and in the future it should support other Kubernetes resources besides ReplicationControllers. You can see some mockups in the GitHub repo.

I'm one of the Dashboard UI maintainers.
Deployments will be shown in the UI in next release (a few weeks from now). I'm sorry this wasn't done before, but we had tight schedule. If you want to test the features sooner, use v1.1.0-beta2 version of the UI which will be released next week.

Related

Kubernetes - keeping the execution logs of a pod

I'm trying to keep the execution logs of containers in Kubernetes.
I added in my cronjob yaml the successfulJobsHistoryLimit: 5 failedJobsHistoryLimit: 5 in order to see the execution history, but when I try to view the logs of the pods I get this error
I assume it is because the pods have been deleted because when I go to a running pod I can see the logs.
So is there a way of keeping the logs in this part of Kubernetes or is there something that I have to setup in order to have this functionality?
Sorry if the question have been asked but I didn't really find something and I'm new to Kubernetes.
Thanks for the replies.
Looking at this problem in a bigger picture it's generally a good idea to have your logs stored via logging agents or directly pushed into an external service as per the official documentation.
Taking advantage of Kubernetes logging architecture explained here you can also try to fetch the logs directly from the log-rotate files in the node hosting the pods. Please note that this option might depend on the specific Kubernetes implementation as log files might be deleted when the pod eviction is triggered.

Customizing kubernetes dashboard with company name and environment

Problem statement:
Currently we are running k8s in multiple environments e.g. dev, uat,staging.
It becomes very difficult to identify for us just by looking at k8s dashboard UI.
Do we have any facility to customize k8s dashboard indicating somewhere in header or footer cluster or environment we are using?
Since K8S is open source, you should have the ability to do whatever you want. You will ofcourse need to play with the code and build you own custom dashboard image.
You can start off from here
https://github.com/kubernetes/dashboard/tree/master/src/app/frontend
This feature was released back in 2017, with the introduction of the settings ConfigMap. You just need to set the values of the kubernetes-dashboard-settings ConfigMap in kubernetes-dashboard namespace. You don't even need to restart the dashboard service/deployment.

What is the difference between the core os projects kube-prometheus and prometheus operator?

The github repo of Prometheus Operator https://github.com/coreos/prometheus-operator/ project says that
The Prometheus Operator makes the Prometheus configuration Kubernetes native and manages and operates Prometheus and Alertmanager clusters. It is a piece of the puzzle regarding full end-to-end monitoring.
kube-prometheus combines the Prometheus Operator with a collection of manifests to help getting started with monitoring Kubernetes itself and applications running on top of it.
Can someone elaborate this?
I've always had this exact same question/repeatedly bumped into both, but tbh reading the above answer didn't clarify it for me/I needed a short explanation. I found this github issue that just made it crystal clear to me.
https://github.com/coreos/prometheus-operator/issues/2619
Quoting nicgirault of GitHub:
At last I realized that prometheus-operator chart was packaging
kube-prometheus stack but it took me around 10 hours playing around to
realize this.
**Here's my summarized explanation:
"kube-prometheus" and "Prometheus Operator Helm Chart" both do the same thing:
Basically the Ingress/Ingress Controller Concept, applied to Metrics/Prometheus Operator.
Both are a means of easily configuring, installing, and managing a huge distributed application (Kubernetes Prometheus Stack) on Kubernetes:**
What is the Entire Kube Prometheus Stack you ask? Prometheus, Grafana, AlertManager, CRDs (Custom Resource Definitions), Prometheus Operator(software bot app), IaC Alert Rules, IaC Grafana Dashboards, IaC ServiceMonitor CRDs (which auto-generate Prometheus Metric Collection Configuration and auto hot import it into Prometheus Server)
(Also when I say easily configuring I mean 1,000-10,000++ lines of easy for humans to understand config that generates and auto manage 10,000-100,000 lines of machine config + stuff with sensible defaults + monitoring configuration self-service, distributed configuration sharding with an operator/controller to combine config + generate verbose boilerplate machine-readable config from nice human-readable config.
If they achieve the same end goal, you might ask what's the difference between them?
https://github.com/coreos/kube-prometheus
https://github.com/helm/charts/tree/master/stable/prometheus-operator
Basically, CoreOS's kube-prometheus deploys the Prometheus Stack using Ksonnet.
Prometheus Operator Helm Chart wraps kube-prometheus / achieves the same end result but with Helm.
So which one to use?
Doesn't matter + they achieve the same end result + shouldn't be crazy difficult to start with 1 and switch to the other.
Helm tends to be faster to learn/develop basic mastery of.
Ksonnet is harder to learn/develop basic mastery of, but:
it's more idempotent (better for CICD automation) (but it's only a difference of 99% idempotent vs 99.99% idempotent.)
has built-in templating which means that if you have multiple clusters you need to manage / that you want to always keep consistent with each other. Then you can leverage ksonnet's templating to manage multiple instances of the Kube Prometheus Stack (for multiple envs) using a DRY code base with lots of code reuse. (If you only have a few envs and Prometheus doesn't need to change often it's not completely unreasonable to keep 4 helm values files in sync by hand. I've also seen Jinja2 templating used to template out helm values files, but if you're going to bother with that you may as well just consider ksonnet.)
Kubernetes operator are kubernetes specific application(pods) that configure, manage and optimize other Kubernetes deployments automatically. They are implemented as a custom controller.
According to official coreOS website:
Operators were introduced by CoreOS as a class of software that operates other software, putting operational knowledge collected by humans into software.
The prometheus operator provides the easy way to deploy configure and monitor your prometheus instances on kubernetes cluster. To do so, prometheus operator introduces three types of custom resource definition(CRD) in kubernetes.
Prometheus
Alertmanager
ServiceMonitor
Now, with the help of above CRD's, you can directly create a prometheus instance by providing kind: Prometheus and the prometheus instance is ready to serve, likewise you can do for AlertManager. Without this you would have to setup the deployment for prometheus with its image, configuration and many more things.
The Prometheus Operator serves to make running Prometheus on top of Kubernetes as easy as possible, while preserving Kubernetes-native configuration options.
Now, kube-prometheus implemented the prometheus operator and provides you minimum yaml files to create your basic setup of prometheus, alertmanager and grafana by running a single command.
git clone https://github.com/coreos/prometheus-operator.git
kubectl apply -f prometheus-operator/contrib/kube-prometheus/manifests/
By running above command in kube-prometheus directory, you will get a monitoring namespace which will have an instance of alertmanager, prometheus and grafana for UI. This is enough setup for most of the basic implementation and if you need any more specifics according to your application, you can add more yamls of exporter you need.
Kube-prometheus is more of a contribution to prometheus-operator project, which implements the prometheus operator functionality very well and provide you a complete monitoring setup for your kubernetes cluster. You can start with kube-prometheus and extend the functionality of your monitoring setup according to your application from there.
You can learn more about prometheus-operator here
As of today, 28-09-2020, this is the way to install Prometheus in a Kubernetes cluster
https://github.com/prometheus-community/helm-charts/tree/main/charts/kube-prometheus-stack#kube-prometheus-stack
According to official documentation, kube-prometheus-stack is a rename of prometheus-operator.
As I understood, kube-prometheus-stack also has preinstalled grafana dashboards and prometheus rules.
Note: This chart was formerly named prometheus-operator chart, now
renamed to more clearly reflect that it installs the kube-prometheus
project stack, within which Prometheus Operator is only one component.
Taken from https://github.com/prometheus-community/helm-charts/tree/main/charts/kube-prometheus-stack
Architecturally the container runs docker
The default container logs are managed by Docker, and the default log driver uses JSON-file
log-driver": "json-file
https://docs.docker.com/config/containers/logging/configure/
If the default jSON-file is used to manage container logs, log rotation is not performed by default. Therefore, the default JSON-file log driver the log files stored by the log driver can result in a large amount of disk space for containers that generate a large amount of output, which can cause disk space to run out.
In this case, save the log to ES, store it separately, and periodically delete the index using curator kubernetes
And run a scheduled task in K8S to delete the index periodically
Another solution for disk space is to periodically delete old logs from jSON-files
Typically we set the size and number of logs
This will set up a maximum of 10 log files, each with a maximum size of 20 Mb. Therefore, the container has a maximum of 200 Mb of logs
"log-driver": "json-file", "log-opts": { "max-size": "20m", "max-file": "10" },
Note: In general, the default Docker log is placed
/var/lib/docker/containers/
But in the same case kubernetes also saves logs and creates a directory structure to help you find pods-based logs, so you can find container logs for each Pod running on a node
/var/log/pods/<namespace>_<pod_name>_<pod_id>/<container_name>/
When removing pod, / var/lib/container under the docker/containers/log and k8s created under/var/log/pods/pod log will be deleted
For example, if the POD is restarted during production, the pod log will be deleted whether it is on the original node or jumped to another node
Therefore, this log needs to be saved in ES for centralized management. Many R&D projects will check the log for troubleshooting in most cases

Kubernetes rolling update vs set image

After some intense google and SO search i couldn't find any document that mentions both rolling update and set image, and can stress the difference between the two.
Can anyone shed light? When would I rather use either of those?
EDIT: It's worth mentioning that i'm already working with deployments (rather than replication controller directly) and that I'm using yaml configuration files. It would also be nice to know if there's a way to perform any of those using configuration files rather than direct commands.
In older k8s versions the ReplicationController was the only resource to manage a group of replicated pods. To update the pods of a ReplicationController you use kubectl rolling-update.
Later, k8s introduced the Deployment which manages ReplicaSet resources. The Deployment could be updated via kubectl set image.
Working with Deployment resources (as you already do) is the preferred way. I guess the ReplicationController and its rolling-update command are mainly still there for backward compatibility.
UPDATE: As mentioned in the comments:
To update a Deployment I used kubectl patch as it could also change things like adding new env vars whereas kubectl set image is rather limited and can only change the image version. Also note, that patch can be applied to all k8s resources and is not restricted to be used with a Deployment.
Later, I shifted my deployment processes to use helm - a really neat and k8s native package management tool. Can highly recommend to have a look at it.

Is there a way to make kubectl apply restart deployments whose image tag has not changed?

I've got a local deployment system that is mirroring our production system. Both are deployed by calling kubectl apply -f deployments-and-services.yaml
I'm tagging all builds with the current git hash, which means that for clean deploys to GKE, all the services have a new docker image tag which means that apply will restart them, but locally to minikube the tag is often not changing which means that new code is not run. Before I was working around this by calling kubectl delete and then kubectl create for deploying to minikube, but as the number of services I'm deploying has increased, that is starting to stretch the dev cycle too far.
Ideally, I'd like a better way to tell kubectl apply to restart a deployment rather than just depending on the tag?
I'm curious how people have been approaching this problem.
Additionally, I'm building everything with bazel which means that I have to be pretty explicit about setting up my build commands. I'm thinking maybe I should switch to just delete/creating the one service I'm working on and leave the others running.
But in that case, maybe I should just look at telepresence and run the service I'm dev'ing on outside of minikube all together? What are best practices here?
I'm not entirely sure I understood your question but that may very well be my reading comprehension :)
In any case here's a few thoughts that popped up while reading this (again not sure what you're trying to accomplish)
Option 1: maybe what you're looking for is to scale down and back up, i.e. scale your deployment to say 0 and then back up, given you're using configmap and maybe you only want to update that, the command would be kubectl scale --replicas=0 -f foo.yaml and then back to whatever
Option 2: if you want to apply the deployment and not kill any pods for example, you would use the cascade=false (google it)
Option 3: lookup the rollout option to manage deployments, not sure if it works on services though
Finally, and that's only me talking, share some more details like which version of k8s are you using? maybe provide an actual use case example to better describe the issue.
Kubernetes, only triggers a deployment when something has changed, if you have image pull policy to always you can delete your pods to get the new image, if you want kube to handle the deployment you can update the kubernetes yaml file to container a constantly changing metadata field (I use seconds since epoch) which will trigger a change. Ideally you should be tagging your images with unique tags from your CI/CD pipeline with the commit reference they have been built from. this gets around this issue and allows you to take full advantage of the kubernetes rollback feature.