Deploying a Postgres-Based Open Event Server to Kubernetes

In this post, I will walk you through deploying the Open Event Server on Kubernetes, hosted on Google Cloud Platform’s Compute Engine. You’ll be needing a Google account for this, so create one if you don’t have one.

First, I cd into the root of our project’s Git repository. Now I need to create a Dockerfile. I will use Docker to package our project into a nice image which can be then be “pushed” to Google Cloud Platform. A Dockerfile is essentially a text doc which simply contains the commands required to assemble an image. For more details on how to write one for your project specifically, check out Docker docs. For Open Event Server, the Dockerfile looks like the following:

FROM python:3-slim

ENV INSTALL_PATH /open_event
RUN mkdir -p $INSTALL_PATH

WORKDIR $INSTALL_PATH

# apt-get update and update some packages
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y wget git ca-certificates curl && update-ca-certificates && apt-get clean -y


# install deps
RUN apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends build-essential python-dev libpq-dev libevent-dev libmagic-dev && apt-get clean -y

# copy just requirements
COPY requirements.txt requirements.txt
COPY requirements requirements

# install requirements
RUN pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt 
RUN pip install eventlet

# copy remaining files
COPY . .

CMD bash scripts/docker_run.sh

These commands simply install the dependencies and set up the environment for our project. The final CMD command is for running our project, which, in our case, is a server.

After our Dockerfile is configured, I go to Google Cloud Platform’s console and create a new project:

Screen Shot 2018-08-09 at 7.37.34 PM

Once I enter the product name and other details, I enable billing in order to use Google’s cloud resources. A credit card is required to set up a billing account, but Google doesn’t charge any money for that. Also, one of the perks of being a part of FOSSASIA was that I had about $3000 in Google Cloud credits! Once billing is enabled, I then enable the Container Engine API. It is required to support Kubernetes on Google Compute Engine. Next step is to install Google Cloud SDK. Once that is done, I run the following command to install Kubernetes CLI tool:

gcloud components install kubectl

Then I configure the Google Cloud Project Zone via the following command:

gcloud config set compute/zone us-west1-a

Now I will create a disk (for storing our code and data) as well as a temporary instance for formatting that disk:

gcloud compute disks create pg-data-disk --size 1GB
gcloud compute instances create pg-disk-formatter
gcloud compute instances attach-disk pg-disk-formatter --disk pg-data-disk

Once the disk is attached to our instance, I SSH into it and list the available disks:

gcloud compute ssh "pg-disk-formatter"

Now, ls the available disks:

ls /dev/disk/by-id

This will list multiple disks (as shown in the Terminal window below), but the one I want to format is “google-persistent-disk-1”.

Screen Shot 2018-08-09 at 7.48.39 PM.png

Now I format that disk via the following command:

sudo mkfs.ext4 -F -E lazy_itable_init=0,lazy_journal_init=0,discard /dev/disk/by-id/google-persistent-disk-1

Finally, after the formatting is done, I exit the SSH session and detach the disk from the instance:

gcloud compute instances detach-disk pg-disk-formatter --disk pg-data-disk

Now I create a Kubernetes cluster and get its credentials (for later use) via gcloud CLI:

gcloud container clusters create opev-cluster
gcloud container clusters get-credentials opev-cluster

I can additionally bind our deployment to a domain name! If you already have a domain name, you can use the IP reserved below as an A record of your domain’s DNS Zone. Otherwise, get a free domain at freenom.com and do the same with that domain. This static external IP address is reserved in the following manner:

gcloud compute addresses create testip --region us-west1

It’ll be useful if I note down this IP for further reference. I now add this IP (and our domain name if I used one) in Kubernetes configuration files (for Open Event Server, these were specific files for services like nginx and PostgreSQL):

#
# Deployment of the API Server and celery worker
#
kind: Deployment
apiVersion: apps/v1beta1
metadata:
name: api-server
namespace: web
spec:
replicas: 1
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: api-server
spec:
volumes:
- name: data-store
emptyDir: {}
containers:
- name: api-server
image: eventyay/nextgen-api-server:latest
command: ["/bin/sh","-c"]
args: ["./kubernetes/run.sh"]
livenessProbe:
httpGet:
path: /health-check/
port: 8080
initialDelaySeconds: 30
timeoutSeconds: 3
ports:
- containerPort: 8080
protocol: TCP
envFrom:
- configMapRef:
name: api-server
env:
- name: C_FORCE_ROOT
value: 'true'
- name: PYTHONUNBUFFERED
value: 'TRUE'
- name: DEPLOYMENT
value: 'api'
- name: FORCE_SSL
value: 'yes'
volumeMounts:
- mountPath: /opev/open_event/static/uploads/
name: data-store
- name: celery
image: eventyay/nextgen-api-server:latest
command: ["/bin/sh","-c"]
args: ["./kubernetes/run.sh"]
envFrom:
- configMapRef:
name: api-server
env:
- name: C_FORCE_ROOT
value: 'true'
- name: DEPLOYMENT
value: 'celery'
volumeMounts:
- mountPath: /opev/open_event/static/uploads/
name: data-store
restartPolicy: Always

These files will look similar for your specific project as well. Finally, I run the deployment script provided for Open Event Server to deploy with defined configuration:

./kubernetes/deploy.sh create all

This is the specific deployment script for this project; for your app, this will be a bunch of simple kubectl create * commands specific to your app’s context. Once this script completes, our app is deployed! After a few minutes, I can see it live at the domain I provided above!

I can also see our project’s statistics and set many other attributes at Google Cloud Platform’s console:

Screen Shot 2018-08-09 at 7.49.42 PM.png

And that’s it for this post! For more details on deploying Docker-based containers on Kubernetes clusters hosted by Google, visit Google Cloud Platform’s documentation.

Resources

Continue ReadingDeploying a Postgres-Based Open Event Server to Kubernetes

Setting Loklak Server with SSL

Loklak Server is based on embedded Jetty Server which can work both with or without SSL encryption. Lately, there was need to setup Loklak Server with SSL. Though the need was satisfied by CloudFlare. Alternatively, there are 2 ways to set up Loklak Server with SSL. They are:-

1) Default Jetty Implementation

There is pre-existing implementation of Jetty libraries. The http mode can be set in configuration file. There are 4 modes on which Loklak Server can work: http mode, https mode, only https mode and redirect to https mode. Loklak Server listens to port 9000 when in http mode and to port 9443 when in https mode.

There is also a need of SSL certificate which is to be added in configuration file.

2) Getting SSL certificate with Kube-Lego on Kubernetes Deployment

I got to know about Kube-Lego by @niranjan94. It is implemented in Open-Event-Orga-Server. The approach is to use:

a) Nginx as ingress controller

For setting up Nginx ingress controller, a yml file is needed which downloads and configures the server.

The configurations for data requests and response are:

proxy-connect-timeout: "15"
 proxy-read-timeout: "600"
 proxy-send-imeout: "600"
 hsts-include-subdomains: "false"
 body-size: "64m"
 server-name-hash-bucket-size: "256"
 server-tokens: "false"

Nginx is configured to work on both http and https ports in service.yml

ports:
- port: 80
  name: http
- port: 443
  name: https

 

b) Kube-Lego for fetching SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt

Kube-Lego was set up with default values in yml. It uses the host-name, email address and secretname of the deployment to validate url and fetch SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt.

c) Setup configurations related to TLS and no-TLS connection

These configuration files mentions the path and service ports for Nginx Server through which requests are forwarded to backend Loklak Server. Here for no-TLS and TLS requests, the requests are directly forwarded to localhost at port 80 of Loklak Server container.

rules:
- host: staging.loklak.org
  http:
  paths:
  - path: /
    backend:
    serviceName: server
    servicePort: 80

For TLS requests, the secret name is also mentioned. Kube-Lego fetches host-name and secret-name from here for the certificate

tls:
- hosts:
- staging.loklak.org
  secretName: loklak-api-tls

d) Loklak Server, ElasticSearch and Mosquitto at backend

These containers work at backend. ElasticSearch and Mosquitto are only accessible to Loklak Server. Loklak Server can be accessed through Nginx server. Loklak Server is configured to work at http mode and is exposed at port 80.

ports:
- port: 80
  protocol: TCP
  targetPort: 80

To deploy the Loklak Server, all these are deployed in separate pods and they interact through service ports. To deploy, we use deploy script:

# For elasticsearch, accessible only to api-server
kubectl create -R -f ${path-to-config-file}/elasticsearch/

# For mqtt, accessible only to api-server
kubectl create -R -f ${path-to-config-file}/mosquitto/

# Start KubeLego deployment for TLS certificates
kubectl create -R -f ${path-to-config-file}/lego/
kubectl create -R -f ${path-to-config-file}/nginx/

# Create web namespace, this acts as bridge to Loklak Server
kubectl create -R -f ${path-to-config-file}/web/

# Create API server deployment and expose the services
kubectl create -R -f ${path-to-config-file}/api-server/

# Get the IP address of the deployment to be used
kubectl get services --namespace=nginx-ingress

References

Continue ReadingSetting Loklak Server with SSL

How to Debug SUSI Bots Deployment on Google Container Engine Using Kubernetes

You can learn how to deploy SUSI bots on to Google container engine using Kubernetes from this tutorial. In this blog, we will learn how to debug SUSI bots deployment to keep them running continuously. Whenever we create a deployment on Google container using Kubernetes a pod is created in which our deployment keeps running. Whenever we deploy bots to any platform to check if it is working right or not we refer to logs of that bot. To get logs first we will get pod for our deployment with this

kubectl get pods --namespace={your-namespace-of-deployment-here}

This will show us the pod for our deployment like this

Copy the name of this pod and enter this command to get logs

kubectl get logs {your-pod-here} --namespace={your-namespace-of-deployment-here}

This will show us the logs of our deployment. In Google cloud console you will not get running logs. You will get logs of the everything that has happened before you requested for logs. Now if there is some error in logs and you need to restart the deployment but in Kubernetes you can not restart your pod directly but to restart pod we will need to enter the following command

kubectl replace --force -f {path-to-your-deployment-config-file}

If everything goes well you will get to see the following with your deployment name in it


After deployment, if you want to see the services and deployment in detail follow the approach given below

To get services write this command

kubectl get service --namespace={your-namespace-of-deployment-here}

When you will get service it will look like

If you don’t get your external IP then check your service config file and after fixing it make a new deployment after deleting previous one.

To check deployment in detail write following command

kubectl describe deployments --namespace={your-namespace-of-deployment-here}

This will show us details about deployment like this

You can now easily solve issues with deployments now.

Resources

Debugging Kubernetes service locally using telepresence: https://www.telepresence.io/tutorials/kubernetes.html
Debug Services: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug-application-cluster/debug-service/
Troubleshooting Kuberetes: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux_atomic_host/7/html/getting_started_with_kubernetes/troubleshooting_kubernetes

 

Continue ReadingHow to Debug SUSI Bots Deployment on Google Container Engine Using Kubernetes

Continuous Integration and Deployment of Yacy Grid

We have deployed Yacy Grid on Google cloud recently, and we have achieved this using kubernetes and Travis for auto deployment.

How we have deployed it:

Firstly, it is advised to have different containers for each service your application requires, and follow a multi container architecture. Using multi container architecture you can allocate fixed size of power to each application and also replicate individual services, whichever is required. Presently, Yacy has two main applications which are required to be deployed in separate containers – Yacy_grid_mcp and ElasticSearch.

We took the official kubernetes YAML files of ElasticSearch and followed the instructions at https://github.com/kubernetes/examples/blob/master/staging/elasticsearch/README.md for deployment of elastic search on the google cloud.

With this we are able to run pods, volumes required for elastic search and services for connecting Yacy with elastic search.

The pull request regarding deployment of separate elasticsearch component is at https://github.com/yacy/yacy_grid_mcp/pull/27/files

Below figure shows different services and external endpoints present pods use for elastic search.

Now elastic search can be accessed at 35.202.154.219:9300 and http://35.193.124.253:9200/

Continuous deployment of Yacy_grid_mcp:

Please make sure that you have created a cluster on google container engine for deploying our containers on it. Regarding starting a project and cluster please read https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/docs/

1.Initially, Travis.yml initiates and sets up the required environment for Yacy deployment by installing Google cloud cli and kubectl components.

Source code regarding the Travis setup could be found at https://github.com/yacy/yacy_grid_mcp/blob/master/.travis.yml

2.Later Travis runs the depoy_staging.sh file, which builds the docker image of yacy o the present build and pushes it to hub.docker.com

if [ "$TRAVIS_PULL_REQUEST" != "false" -o "$TRAVIS_BRANCH" != "$SOURCE_BRANCH" ]; then
    echo "Skipping deploy; The request or commit is not on master"
    exit 0
fi

set -e

docker build -t nikhilrayaprolu/yacygridmcp:$TRAVIS_COMMIT ./docker
docker login -u="$DOCKER_USERNAME" -p="$DOCKER_PASSWORD"
docker tag nikhilrayaprolu/yacygridmcp:$TRAVIS_COMMIT nikhilrayaprolu/yacygridmcp:latest
docker push nikhilrayaprolu/yacygridmcp

Later with service key, we authenticate with google cloud and set the required environments and variables

echo $GCLOUD_SERVICE   base64 --decode -i > ${HOME}/gcloud-service-key.json
gcloud auth activate-service-account --key-file ${HOME}/gcloud-service-key.json

gcloud --quiet config set project $PROJECT_NAME_STG
gcloud --quiet config set container/cluster $CLUSTER_NAME_STG
gcloud --quiet config set compute/zone ${CLOUDSDK_COMPUTE_ZONE}
gcloud --quiet container clusters get-credentials $CLUSTER_NAME_STG

And Later we push the docker image built to google cloud and deploy it

kubectl config view
kubectl config current-context

kubectl set image deployment/${KUBE_DEPLOYMENT_NAME} ${KUBE_DEPLOYMENT_CONTAINER_NAME}=nikhilrayaprolu/yacygridmcp:$TRAVIS_COMMIT

Presently Yacy runs on 5vCPUs

With the following pods and services:

Also one can use kubectl cli for getting information regarding the cluster and pods as shown below

Pull request regarding deployment of yacy on google cloud is available at: https://github.com/yacy/yacy_grid_mcp/pull/16/files

References:

1.A Medium Blog on CD to Google Container: https://medium.com/google-cloud/continuous-delivery-in-a-microservice-infrastructure-with-google-container-engine-docker-and-fb9772e81da7

2.Another Blog on CD to Google Container: https://engineering.hexacta.com/automatic-deployment-of-multiple-docker-containers-to-google-container-engine-using-travis-e5d9e191d5ad

3.Deploying ElasticSearch to Cloud using Kubernetes: https://github.com/kubernetes/examples/blob/master/staging/elasticsearch/README.md

Continue Reading

How to Get Secure Webhook for SUSI Bots in Kubernetes Deployment

Webhook is a user-defined callback which gets triggered by any events in code like receiving a message from a user in SUSI bot is an event. Few bots need webhook URI for callback like in SUSI Viber bot we need to define a webhook URI in the code to receive callbacks and make our Viber bot work. In this blog, we will learn how can we get an SSL activated webhook while deploying our bot to Google container using Kubernetes. We will generate SSL certificate using kube lego service that is included in kubernetes and you will define that in yaml files below. We can also generate SSL certificate using third party services like CloudFlare but by using it we will be dependant on CloudFlare so we will use kube lego.

We will start off by registering a domain first on which we will activate SSL certificate and use that domain as a webhook. Go to freenom and register your account. After logging in, register a free domain of any name and check out that order. Next, you have to set IP for DNS of this domain. To do so we will reserve an IP address in our Google cloud project with this command:

gcloud compute addresses create IPname --region us-central1

You will get a created message. To see your IP go to VPC Network -> External IP addresses. Add this IP to DNS zone of your domain and save it for later use in yaml files that we will use for deployment. Now we will deploy our bot using yaml files but before deployment, we will create a cluster

gcloud container clusters create clusterName

After creating cluster add these yaml files to your bot repository and add your IP address that you have saved above to the yamls/nginx/service.yaml file for “loadBalancerIP” parameter. Replace domain name in yamls/application/ingress-notls.yaml and yamls/application/ingress-tls.yaml with your domain name that you have registered already. Add your email ID to yamls/lego/configmap.yaml for “lego.email” parameter. Replace “image” and “env” parameters in yamls/application/deployment.yaml with your docker image and your environment variables that you are using in your code. After changing yaml files we will use this deploy script to create a deployment. Change paths for yaml files in script according to your yaml files path.

In gcloud shell run the following command to deploy an application using given configurations.

bash ./path-to-deploy-script/deploy.sh create all

This will create the deployment as we have defined in the script. The Kubernetes master creates the load balancer and related Compute Engine forwarding rules, target pools, and firewall rules to make the service fully accessible from outside of Google Cloud Platform. Wait for a few minutes for all the containers to be created and the SSL Certificates to be generated and loaded.

You have successfully created a secure webhook. Test it by opening the domain that you have registered at the start.

Resources

Enabling SSL using CloudFlare: https://jonnyjordan.com/blog/how-to-setup-cloudflare-flexible-ssl-for-wordpress/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFvwEVkl5gk

Continue ReadingHow to Get Secure Webhook for SUSI Bots in Kubernetes Deployment

Optimising Docker Images for loklak Server

The loklak server is in a process of moving to Kubernetes. In order to do so, we needed to have different Docker images that suit these deployments. In this blog post, I will be discussing the process through which I optimised the size of Docker image for these deployments.

Initial Image

The image that I started with used Ubuntu as base. It installed all the components needed and then modified the configurations as required –

FROM ubuntu:latest

# Env Vars
ENV LANG=en_US.UTF-8
ENV JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS=-Dfile.encoding=UTF8
ENV DEBIAN_FRONTEND noninteractive

WORKDIR /loklak_server

RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get upgrade -y
RUN apt-get install -y git openjdk-8-jdk
RUN git clone https://github.com/loklak/loklak_server.git /loklak_server
RUN git checkout development
RUN ./gradlew build -x test -x checkstyleTest -x checkstyleMain -x jacocoTestReport
RUN sed -i.bak 's/^\(port.http=\).*/\180/' conf/config.properties
... # More configurations
RUN echo "while true; do sleep 10;done" >> bin/start.sh

# Start
CMD ["bin/start.sh", "-Idn"]

The size of images built using this Dockerfile was quite huge –

REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED              SIZE

loklak_server       latest              a92f506b360d        About a minute ago   1.114 GB

ubuntu              latest              ccc7a11d65b1        3 days ago           120.1 MB

But since this size is not acceptable, we needed to reduce it.

Moving to Apline

Alpine Linux is an extremely lightweight Linux distro, built mainly for the container environment. Its size is so tiny that it hardly puts any impact on the overall size of images. So, I replaced Ubuntu with Alpine –

FROM alpine:latest

...
RUN apk update
RUN apk add git openjdk8 bash
...

And now we had much smaller images –

REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE

loklak_server       latest              54b507ee9187        17 seconds ago      668.8 MB

alpine              latest              7328f6f8b418        6 weeks ago         3.966 MB

As we can see that due to no caching and small size of Alpine, the image size is reduced to almost half the original.

Reducing Content Size

There are many things in a project which are no longer needed while running the project, like the .git folder (which is huge in case of loklak) –

$ du -sh loklak_server/.git
236M loklak_server/.git

We can remove such files from the Docker image and save a lot of space –

rm -rf .[^.] .??*

Optimizing Number of Layers

The number of layers also affect the size of the image. More the number of layers, more will be the size of image. In the Dockerfile, we can club together the RUN commands for lower number of images.

RUN apk update && apk add openjdk8 git bash && \
  git clone https://github.com/loklak/loklak_server.git /loklak_server && \
  ...

After this, the effective size is again reduced by a major factor –

REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE

loklak_server       latest              54b507ee9187        17 seconds ago      422.3 MB

alpine              latest              7328f6f8b418        6 weeks ago         3.966 MB

Conclusion

In this blog post, I discussed the process of optimising the size of Dockerfile for Kubernetes deployments of loklak server. The size was reduced to 426 MB from 1.234 GB and this provided much faster push/pull time for Docker images, and therefore, faster updates for Kubernetes deployments.

Resources

Continue ReadingOptimising Docker Images for loklak Server

How to Deploy Node js App to Google Container Engine Using Kubernetes

There are many ways to host node js apps. A popular way is to host your app on Heroku. We can also deploy our app to Google cloud platform on container engine using Kubernetes. In this blog, we will learn how to deploy node js app on container engine with kubernetes. There are many resources on the web but we will use YAML files to create a deployment and to build docker image we will not use Google container registry (GCR) as it will cost us more for the deployment. To deploy we will start by creating an account on Google cloud and you can get a free tier of Google cloud platform worth 300$ for 12 months. After creating account create a project with any name of your choice. Enable Google cloud shell from an icon on right top.

We will also need a docker image of our app for deployment. To create a docker image first create an account on https://www.docker.com and create a repository with any name on it. Now, we will add docker file into our repository so that we can build docker image. Dockerfile will contain this code:

FROM node:boron
# Create app directory
RUN mkdir -p /usr/src/app
WORKDIR /usr/src/app
# Install app dependencies
COPY package.json /usr/src/app
RUN npm install
# Bundle app source
COPY . /usr/src/app
EXPOSE 8080
CMD [ "npm", "start" ]

You can see an example of docker file in SUSI telegram repository. After pushing docker file to your repository we will now build docker image of the app. In Google cloud shell clone, your repository with git clone {your-repository-link here }and change your current directory to the cloned app. We will use –no-cache -t arguments as described above it will be better for building docker image and it will use fewer resources. Run these two commands to build docker image and pushing it to your docker hub.

docker build --no-cache -t {your-docker-username-here}/{repository-name-on-docker here} .

docker push {your-docker-username-here}/{repository-name-on-docker here}


We have successfully created docker image for our app. Now we will deploy our app to container engine using this image. To deploy it we will use configuration files. Add a yaml folder in your repository and we will add four files into it now. In the first file, we will specify the namespace and name it as 00-namespace.yml It will contain following code:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
 name: web

In second file we will configure our namespace that we specified and name it as configmap.yml It will contain following code:

apiVersion: v1
metadata:
 name:{name-of-your-deployment-here}
 namespace: web
kind: ConfigMap

In third file, we will define our deployment and name it as deployment.yml It will contain following code:

kind: Deployment
apiVersion: apps/v1beta1
metadata:
 name: {name-of-your-deployment-here}
 namespace: web
spec:
 replicas: 1
 template:
   metadata:
     labels:
       app: {name-of-your-deployment-here}
   spec:
     containers:
     - name: {name-of-your-deployment-here}
       image: {your-docker-username-here}/{repository-name-on-docker here}:latest
       ports:
       - containerPort: 8080
         protocol: TCP
       envFrom:
       - configMapRef:
           name: {name-of-your-deployment-here}
     restartPolicy: Always

In fourth file, we will define service for our deployment and name it as service.yml It will contain following code:

kind: Service
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
 name: {name-of-your-deployment-here}
 namespace: web
spec:
 ports:
 - port: 8080
   protocol: TCP
   targetPort: 8080
 selector:
   app: {name-of-your-deployment-here}
 type: LoadBalancer

After adding these files to repository we will now deploy our app to a cluster on container engine. Go to Google cloud shell and run the following commands:

gcloud config set compute/zone us-central1-b

This will set zone for our cluster.

gcloud container clusters create {name-your-cluster-here}

Now update in your repository with git pull as we have added new files to it. Run the following command to make your deployment and to see it:

kubectl create -R -f ./yamls

This will create our deployment.

kubectl get services --namespace=web


With above command, you will get external IP for your app and open that IP in your browser with the port. You will see your app.

kubectl get deployments --namespace=web

Run this command if available is 1 then it means your deployment is running the file.

You have successfully deployed your app to container engine using kubernetes.

Resources

Tutorial on Google cloud: https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/docs/tutorials/hello-node
Tutorial by Jatin Shridhar: https://www.sitepoint.com/kubernetes-deploy-node-js-docker-app/

Continue ReadingHow to Deploy Node js App to Google Container Engine Using Kubernetes

Auto Deploying loklak Server on Google Cloud Using Travis

This is a setup for loklak server which want to check in only the source files, but have the development branch in Kubernetes deployment automatically updated with some compiled output every time the push using details from Travis build.

How to achieve it?

Unix commands and shell script is one of the best option to automate all deployment and build activities. I explored Kubernetes Gcloud which can be accessed through unix command.

1.Checking for Travis build details before deployment:

Firstly check whether the repository is loklak_server, pull request is available and branches are either master or development, and then decide to update the docker image or not. The code of the aforementioned things is as follows:

if [ "$TRAVIS_REPO_SLUG" != "loklak/loklak_server" ]; then
    echo "Skipping image update for repo $TRAVIS_REPO_SLUG"
    exit 0
fi

if [ "$TRAVIS_PULL_REQUEST" != "false" ]; then
    echo "Skipping image update for pull request"
    exit 0
fi

if [ "$TRAVIS_BRANCH" != "master" ] && [ "$TRAVIS_BRANCH" != "development" ]; then
    echo "Skipping image update for branch $TRAVIS_BRANCH"
    exit 0
fi

2. Setting up Tag and Decrypting the credentials:

For the Kubernetes deployment, each time the travis build is successful, it takes the commit details from travis and appended into tag details for deployment and gcloud credentials is decrypted from the json file.

openssl aes-256-cbc -K $encrypted_48d01dc243a6_key -iv $encrypted_48d01dc243a6_iv  -in kubernetes/gcloud-credentials.json.enc -out kubernetes/gcloud-credentials.json -d

3. Install, Authenticate and Configure GCloud details with Kubernetes:

In this step, initially Google Cloud SDK should be installed with Kubernetes-

curl https://sdk.cloud.google.com | bash > /dev/null
source ~/google-cloud-sdk/path.bash.inc
gcloud components install kubectl

 

Then, Authenticate Google Cloud using the above mentioned decrypted credentials and finally configure the Google Cloud with the details like zone, project name, cluster details, number of nodes etc.

4. Update the Kubernetes deployment:

Since, in this issue it is specific to the loklak_server/development branch, so in here it checks if the branch is development or not and then updates the deployment using following command:

if [ $TRAVIS_BRANCH == "development" ]; then
    kubectl set image deployment/server --namespace=web server=$TAG
fi

 

Conclusion:

In this post, how to write a script in such a way that with each successful push after travis build how to update the deployment on Kubernetes GCloud.

Resources:

Continue ReadingAuto Deploying loklak Server on Google Cloud Using Travis

Persistently Storing loklak Server Dumps on Kubernetes

In an earlier blog post, I discussed loklak setup on Kubernetes. The deployment mentioned in the post was to test the development branch. Next, we needed to have a deployment where all the messages are collected and dumped in text files that can be reused.

In this blog post, I will be discussing the challenges with such deployment and the approach to tackle them.

Volatile Disk in Kubernetes

The pods that hold deployments in Kubernetes have disk storage. Any data that gets written by the application stays only until the same version of deployment is running. As soon as the deployment is updated/relocated, the data stored during the application is cleaned up.


Due to this, dumps are written when loklak is running but they get wiped out when the deployment image is updated. In other words, all dumps are lost when the image updates. We needed to find a solution to this as we needed a permanent storage when collecting dumps.

Persistent Disk

In order to have a storage which can hold data permanently, we can mount persistent disk(s) on a pod at the appropriate location. This ensures that the data that is important to us stays with us, even
when the deployment goes down.


In order to add persistent disks, we first need to create a persistent disk. On Google Cloud Platform, we can use the gcloud CLI to create disks in a given region –

gcloud compute disks create --size=<required size> --zone=<same as cluster zone> <unique disk name>

After this, we can mount it on a Docker volume defined in Kubernetes configurations –

      ...
      volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /path/to/mount
          name: volume-name
  volumes:
    - name: volume-name
      gcePersistentDisk:
        pdName: disk-name
        fsType: fileSystemType

But this setup can’t be used for storing loklak dumps. Let’s see “why” in the next section.

Rolling Updates and Persistent Disk

The Kubernetes deployment needs to be updated when the master branch of loklak server is updated. This update of master deployment would create a new pod and try to start loklak server on it. During all this, the older deployment would also be running and serving the requests.


The control will not be transferred to the newer pod until it is ready and all the probes are passing. The newer deployment will now try to mount the disk which is mentioned in the configuration, but it would fail to do so. This would happen because the older pod has already mounted the disk.


Therefore, all new deployments would simply fail to start due to insufficient resources. To overcome such issues, Kubernetes allows persistent volume claims. Let’s see how we used them for loklak deployment.

Persistent Volume Claims

Kubernetes provides Persistent Volume Claims which claim resources (storage) from a Persistent Volume (just like a pod does from a node). The higher level APIs are provided by Kubernetes (configurations and kubectl command line). In the loklak deployment, the persistent volume is a Google Compute Engine disk –

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolume
metadata:
  name: dump
  namespace: web
spec:
  capacity:
    storage: 100Gi
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Retain
  storageClassName: slow
  gcePersistentDisk:
    pdName: "data-dump-disk"
    fsType: "ext4"

[SOURCE]

It must be noted here that a persistent disk by the name of data-dump-index is already created in the same region.


The storage class defines the way in which the PV should be handled, along with the provisioner for the service –

kind: StorageClass
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
  name: slow
  namespace: web
provisioner: kubernetes.io/gce-pd
parameters:
  type: pd-standard
  zone: us-central1-a

[SOURCE]

After having the StorageClass and PersistentVolume, we can create a claim for the volume by using appropriate configurations –

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: dump
  namespace: web
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 100Gi
  storageClassName: slow

[SOURCE]

After this, we can mount this claim on our Deployment –

  ...
  volumeMounts:
    - name: dump
      mountPath: /loklak_server/data
volumes:
  - name: dump
    persistentVolumeClaim:
      claimName: dump

[SOURCE]

Verifying persistence of Dumps

To verify this, we can redeploy the cluster using the same persistent disk and check if the earlier dumps are still present there –

$ http http://link.to.deployment/dump/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: public, max-age=60
Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8
...


<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">

<h1>Index of /dump</h1>
<pre>      Name 
[gz ] <a href="messages_20170802_71562040.txt.gz">messages_20170802_71562040.txt.gz</a>   Thu Aug 03 00:07:21 GMT 2017   132M
[gz ] <a href="messages_20170803_69925009.txt.gz">messages_20170803_69925009.txt.gz</a>   Mon Aug 07 15:40:04 GMT 2017   532M
[gz ] <a href="messages_20170807_36357603.txt.gz">messages_20170807_36357603.txt.gz</a>   Wed Aug 09 10:26:24 GMT 2017   377M
[txt] <a href="messages_20170809_27974404.txt">messages_20170809_27974404.txt</a>      Thu Aug 10 08:51:49 GMT 2017  1564M
<hr></pre>
...

Conclusion

In this blog post, I discussed the process of deployment of loklak with persistent dumps on Kubernetes. This deployment is intended to work as root.loklak.org in near future. The changes were proposed in loklak/loklak_server#1377 by @singhpratyush (me).

Resources

Continue ReadingPersistently Storing loklak Server Dumps on Kubernetes

Using Mosquitto as a Message Broker for MQTT in loklak Server

In loklak server, messages are collected from various sources and indexed using Elasticsearch. To know when a message of interest arrives, users can poll the search endpoint. But this method would require a lot of HTTP requests, most of them being redundant. Also, if a user would like to collect messages for a particular topic, he would need to make a lot of requests over a period of time to get enough data.

For GSoC 2017, my proposal was to introduce stream API in the loklak server so that we could save ourselves from making too many requests and also add many use cases.

Mosquitto is Eclipse’s project which acts as a message broker for the popular MQTT protocol. MQTT, based on the pub-sub model, is a lightweight and IOT friendly protocol. In this blog post, I will discuss the basic setup of Mosquitto in the loklak server.

Installation and Dependency for Mosquitto

The installation process of Mosquitto is very simple. For Ubuntu, it is available from the pre installed PPAs –

sudo apt-get install mosquitto

Once the message broker is up and running, we can use the clients to connect to it and publish/subscribe to channels. To add MQTT client as a project dependency, we can introduce following line in Gradle dependencies file –

compile group: 'net.sf.xenqtt', name: 'xenqtt', version: '0.9.5'

[SOURCE]

After this, we can use the client libraries in the server code base.

The MQTTPublisher Class

The MQTTPublisher class in loklak would provide an interface to perform basic operations in MQTT. The implementation uses AsyncClientListener to connect to Mosquitto broker –

AsyncClientListener listener = new AsyncClientListener() {
    // Override methods according to needs
};

[SOURCE]

The publish method for the class can be used by other components of the project to publish messages on the desired channel –

public void publish(String channel, String message) {
    this.mqttClient.publish(new PublishMessage(channel, QoS.AT_LEAST_ONCE, message));
}

[SOURCE]

We also have methods which allow publishing of multiple messages to multiple channels in order to increase the functionality of the class.

Starting Publisher with Server

The flags which signal using of streaming service in loklak are located in conf/config.properties. These configurations are referred while initializing the Data Access Object and an MQTTPublisher is created if needed –

String mqttAddress = getConfig("stream.mqtt.address", "tcp://127.0.0.1:1883");
streamEnabled = getConfig("stream.enabled", false);
if (streamEnabled) {
    mqttPublisher = new MQTTPublisher(mqttAddress);
}

[SOURCE]

The mqttPublisher can now be used by other components of loklak to publish messages to the channel they want.

Adding Mosquitto to Kubernetes

Since loklak has also a nice Kubernetes setup, it was very simple to introduce a new deployment for Mosquitto to it.

Changes in Dockerfile

The Dockerfile for master deployment has to be modified to discover Mosquitto broker in the Kubernetes cluster. For this purpose, corresponding flags in config.properties have to be changed to ensure that things work fine –

sed -i.bak 's/^\(stream.enabled\).*/\1=true/' conf/config.properties && \
sed -i.bak 's/^\(stream.mqtt.address\).*/\1=mosquitto.mqtt:1883/' conf/config.properties && \

[SOURCE]

The Mosquitto broker would be available at mosquitto.mqtt:1883 because of the service that is created for it (explained in later section).

Mosquitto Deployment

The Docker image used in Kubernetes deployment of Mosquitto is taken from toke/docker-kubernetes. Two ports are exposed for the cluster but no volumes are needed –

apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: mosquitto
  namespace: mqtt
spec:
  ...
  template:
    ...
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: mosquitto
        image: toke/mosquitto
        ports:
        - containerPort: 9001
        - containerPort: 8883

[SOURCE]

Exposing Mosquitto to the Cluster

Now that we have the deployment running, we need to expose the required ports to the cluster so that other components may use it. The port 9001 appears as port 80 for the service and 1883 is also exposed –

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: mosquitto
  namespace: mqtt
  ...
spec:
  ...
  ports:
  - name: mosquitto
    port: 1883
  - name: mosquitto-web
    port: 80
    targetPort: 9001

[SOURCE]

After creating the service using this configuration, we will be able to connect our clients to Mosquitto at address mosquitto.mqtt:1883.

Conclusion

In this blog post, I discussed the process of adding Mosquitto to the loklak server project. This is the first step towards introducing the stream API for messages collected in loklak.

These changes were introduced in pull requests loklak/loklak_server#1393 and loklak/loklak_server#1398 by @singhpratyush (me).

Resources

Continue ReadingUsing Mosquitto as a Message Broker for MQTT in loklak Server