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Tag Archives: Kubernetes

Kickstart Kubernetes Deployments in the Cloud

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“Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories — those that don’t work, those that break down and those that get lost.” – Russell Baker

Microservices are becoming the standard when discussing CD/CD pipelines and the latest application developments. So the question becomes how do I dive into managing all of these smaller items and gathering metrics around them. For the sake of simplicity, I am going to use Conjur-up which is made by the company who owns the Ubuntu software package. It’s a pretty simple GUI that will allow you to power up many different tools automatically and also do backend configurations for you.

So to start login to your AWS Linux (Ubuntu is best for this) server in AWS here’s a refresher if needed Link

 

Once you’re on a terminal enter –
sudo snap install conjure-up –classic

That should be successful so then run
conjure-up

 

Now we will be presented with a GUI and for this we are going to run the Canonical
Distribution of Kubernetes (CDK)

 

 

You will see a large number of additional components for your distribution here that can be added on. For this demo I will choose Graylog for logging purposes, Helm to manage Kubernetes applications, Prometheus for gathering metrics of your environment and Rancher to manage the cluster.

 

 Hit next and pick the cloud you will be deploying to.

Enter your credentials from the AWS account you will be deploying to.

Choose your corner of the world to run this deployment

I didn’t want to use a service just in-house management so I chose Deploy self hosted

Pick your CNI network plugin, I chose Calico but I wish Weave was an option.

A screen showing the Application that will be installed which make up the deployment options from earlier.

You will now see the actual deployment server being created.

Once that is up and running all of the components of your new environment will be seen as waiting then installed. (This did fail on me twice during install… Just keep retrying it until it works)

Success – you will see this confirmation screen that shows all of your links to the newly created management links.

Once you quit the screen check out some useful password info by running a – kubectl config view

Check out your Grafana dashboards which can be customized to monitor specific metrics that you care about. The Grafana community maintains hundreds of dashboards that may be useful to you. Learn more at the Grafana Labs Dashboards site.

juju status –format yaml grafana/0 | grep public-address
public-address: <your-grafana-ip>


juju run-action –wait grafana/0 get-admin-password
password: <your-grafana-password>

Browse to http://<your-grafana-ip>:3000 and login with admin as the username and <your-grafana-password> as the password.

Start logging into Graylog and heres how to get your graylog password according to the documentation is
juju run-action graylog/0 show-admin-password 
BUT that times out.. So run it with the wait option - juju run-action --wait graylog/0 show-admin-password

From here, you may want to play around with various filters or setup Graylog dashboards to help identify the events that are most important to you. Check out the Graylog Dashboard docs for details on customizing your view.
Finally take a look at the entire environment you created and see the number of machines it built for this! Its a lot and it makes me wonder if using the standard services offered will be cheaper in the long run?

 

 

There’s a lot of tinkering and configurations that you can get started with but this is only a primer for you to get familiar with the setup and possible configurations. Till next time….

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