CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-web-servicesdockerkubernetesminikubegoogle-kubernetes-engine
Lech Rzedzicki
Lech Rzedzicki

Reputation: 435

Setting up Kubernetes cluster in the same way for local dev and testing and deployment

I am very new to Kubernetes so apologies for gaps in my understanding and possibly incorrect wording. I am developing on my local MacBook Pro, which is somewhat resource constrained. My actual payload is a database, which is already running in a Docker container, but obviously needs some sort of persistent storage. The individual containers also need to talk to each over network and some of them need a channel (port open) to the outside world. I would like to set up a single Kubernetes cluster for dev and testing purposes that I can later easily deploy to to bare metal servers or a cloud vendor - Google and AWS.

From reading so far it looks that I can, for example use minikube and orchestrate that cluster on top VirtualBox that I am already running. How would that then map to an actual deployment in the cloud? What additional tools do I need to get it all running, especially with regards to persistent storage and network? Will it map easily to the cloud? What configuration management software would you recommend to maintain all that configuration?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 204

Answers (3)

errordeveloper
errordeveloper

Reputation: 6912

A very short answer is that it's hard to do this properly.

One of the best options I know of is LinuxKit, it allows you to build identical images that you can run on any of the popular cloud providers or in a data centre of your own, or desktop hypervisor. In fact, this is what Docker for Mac is based on.

Disclaimer: I am one of the LinuxKit contributors.

Upvotes: 2

pkaramol
pkaramol

Reputation: 19322

Focusing a bit on your inquiry on the database, I think you have two options (assuming cloud is still an option for you):

  • use a docker database image and mount volumes
  • use an RDS instance in case of aws

I believe that in case of databases the case of volumes is generally not recommended.

What I would suggest you do is (once you grasp a bit the basic concepts, mainly Services, to

  • create an RDS instance and your needed databases therein
  • expose this RDS instance as a Service as type ExternalName

I have been doing the following and so far is working:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: my-database-service
  namespace: some-namespece
spec:
  type: ExternalName
  externalName: <my-rds-endpoint>

After that, you rest of k8s services can reach this service via my-database-service

I think this approach is more db-wise consistent and saves the volumes' hussle.

That being said, I acknowledge that the guidelines in terms of "select-this-if-you-go-for-cloud" or "that-if-you-go-on-prem" are not quite clear yet.

My experience so far indicates that:

Upvotes: 0

Radek &#39;Goblin&#39; Pieczonka
Radek &#39;Goblin&#39; Pieczonka

Reputation: 22884

Generally you get more or less the same kubernetes, regardless of the method you spin up the cluster. Although, comparing to cloud, other deployments will usually lack in what cloud provides by default with kubes built-in cloud providers. Some very important features it relates to are things like out of the box support for LoadBalancer type of services or automatic PersistentVolume provisioning.

If you're ok with not having them, or configuring them additionally for your dev/test env then you should be quite fine.

In scope of PVC/PV, the lack of automatic PV provisioner (unless you set up something like ie. GlusterFS with Heketi to support this) will mean that you will have to provision every PV manualy on the dev/test cluster in opposite to ability of this happening in automatic fashion on cloud.

Also, as you begin, there are ought to be some minor differences between your dev/test setup and prod, so you might really want to investigate manifest templating and management solutions like helm from thew day one of your work with deployments to kubernetes. I know it would save m a lot of headache if I did that my self when I started doing kube.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions