Prerequisite: A reachable S3 endpoint. Can be local or remote, but the pods must be able to resolve its name or IP. Create or select and existing bucket for your database backups. In this case, I have a minio instance running on-prem with a bucket named backup-mysql.
Create a secret for the S3 endpoint credentials. This account will need to be able to write to the database backup bucket. Here’s an example:
Create a TanzuMySQLBackupLocation. In the example below, we’re not using SSL with the minio endpoint, so I’m explicitly using port 80. More examples and details are found here. I like to keep the backups organized, so I’ll create a backup location for each instance and specify an bucketPath for each.
Test with a one-off backup. Create and apply a yaml like the following to request a backup without a schedule. Here’s an example yaml for a one-off backup for the mysql-ha instance to its corresponding backup location:
Apply this kubectl apply -n mysql-instances -f backupschedule-mysql-ha-daily.yaml
I found that (unlike Velero), when applying the MySQLBackupSchedule, a backup does not immediately begin. At the scheduled time however, a pod for the backup schedule will be created to run the backup job. This pod will remain intact to run subsequent backup jobs.
Backup Pods and created Backup objects
Lastly, regarding backups, keep in mind that the backup data on the S3 endpoint never expires, the backups will remain there until removed manually. This may be important if you have limited capacity.
Restore/Recover
From the docs:
MySQLRestores always restores to a new MySQL instance to avoid overwriting any data on an existing MySQL instance. The MySQL instance is created automatically when the restore is triggered. Tanzu MySQL for Kubernetes does not allow you to restore a backup to an existing MySQL instance. Although you can perform this manually by copying the MySQL data from the backup artifact onto an existing MySQL instance, VMware strongly discourages you from doing this because you might overwrite existing data on the MySQL instance.
So, we should not expect to restore directly to a running database instance. If we need to recover, we’ll create a new instance and restore the backup to it.
To create a restore, we’ll need the name of the MySQLBackup object to restore from and a name of a database to create from that backup as part of the restore. We’ll put that into a yaml like the one below. Notice that we provide a spec for a new database, I wanted a loadbalancer for it although we are able to repoint the existing loadbalancer to the new proxy nodes (for ha) or the new database node (for standalone)
Apply the yaml to create the restore kubectl apply -n mysql-instances -f ./restore-ha.yamlYou should see a new database pending and a MySQLRestore object running:
Job is running and instance is pendingRestore job succeeded and there is a new mysql instance
Now, the choice if yours to copy data from the restored database back to the original or to point the applications to the new database or to point the loadbalancer at the new database.
If you choose to repoint the existing load-balancer to the new database, here’s an example how to do that:
kubectl patch service -n mysql-instances mysql-ha -p '{"spec":{"selector":{"app.kubernetes.io/instance": "restored-mysql-database"}}}'
As a follow up to the getting started post, let’s touch on what it takes to configure a MySQL instance for High Availability in Tanzu SQL/MySQL
Why this is important
In kubernetes, pods are generally treated as transient and ephemeral, they can be restarted quickly and are often stateless. This is certainly not the case with databases. We need to make sure our databases remain online and usable. MySQL itself provides a means to do High Availability with multiple instances and synchronization; we’ll be leveraging this capability today.
High Availability Architecture
Blatantly ripped off from the official docs
Unlike our stand-alone instance when create an instance with HA enabled, the operator creates FIVE pods and two services for us.
Pods created for HA instanceServices created for HA instance
You’ll notice that the mysql-ha LoadBalancer uses the proxy pods as its endpoints and the mysql-ha-members uses the database pods themselves.
Create an HA instance
In this example, I’m going to reuse the “harbor” docker-registry secret we created originally, but we’ll want a new tls certificate for this instance.
Create the TLS certificate
Just like previously, save the following as cert-ha.yaml and apply it with kubectl -n mysql-instances -f cert-ha.yaml to create a certificate for our instance. Adjust the names to match your environment of course. Notice the issuerRef.name is ca-issuer
apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
kind: Certificate
metadata:
name: mysql-ha-secret
spec:
# Secret names are always required.
secretName: mysql-ha-secret
duration: 2160h # 90d
renewBefore: 360h # 15d
subject:
organizations:
- ragazzilab.com
# The use of the common name field has been deprecated since 2000 and is
# discouraged from being used.
commonName: mysql-ha.ragazzilab.com
dnsNames:
- mysql-ha.ragazzilab.com
- mysql-ha
- mysql-ha.mysql-instances.svc.cluster.local
# Issuer references are always required.
issuerRef:
name: ca-issuer
# We can reference ClusterIssuers by changing the kind here.
# The default value is Issuer (i.e. a locally namespaced Issuer)
kind: Issuer
# This is optional since cert-manager will default to this value however
# if you are using an external issuer, change this to that issuer group.
group: cert-manager.io
Create the instance
The only differences are highAvailability.enabled:true and the name of the certificate secret
apiVersion: with.sql.tanzu.vmware.com/v1
kind: MySQL
metadata:
name: mysql-ha
spec:
storageSize: 2Gi
imagePullSecret: harbor
#### Set highAvailability.enabled:true to create three pods; one primary and two standby, plus two proxy pods
highAvailability:
enabled: true
#### Set the storage class name to change storage class of the PVC associated with this resource
storageClassName: tanzu
#### Set the type of Service used to provide access to the MySQL database.
serviceType: LoadBalancer # Defaults to ClusterIP
### Set the name of the Secret used for TLS
tls:
secret:
name: mysql-ha-secret
Apply this as usual: kubectl apply -n mysql-instances -f ./mysql-ha.yaml
Create a database user
The steps to create the database user in an HA instance are just like those for the standalone instance once we determine which Pod is the primary/active and writable one. I was unable to make the one-liner method in the official docs work, so here’s what I did instead.
Get the MySQL root password: kubectl get secret -n mysql-instances mysql-ha-credentials -o jsonpath='{.data.rootPassword}' | base64 -D
Get a shell on the mysql-ha-0 pod: kubectl -n mysql-instances exec --stdin --tty pod/mysql-ha-0 -c mysql -- /bin/bash
Get into the mysql cli: mysql -uroot -p<root password>
Identify the Primary member: SELECT MEMBER_HOST, MEMBER_ROLE FROM performance_schema.replication_group_members;
If the primary node is mysql-ha-0 (the one we’re on), proceed to the next step. If it is not, go back to step step 2 to get a shell on the pod that is primary.
Now, we should be on the mysql cli on the primary pod/member. Just like with the standalone instance, let’s create a user:
CREATE USER 'admin'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON * . * TO 'admin'@'%';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Type exit twice to get out of mysql and the pod.
Ok, so now, we have a running instance of mysql and we’ve created a user account that can manage it (cannot login remotely as root). We can connect phpMyAdmin to the instance using the admin credentials:
Let’s deploy Tanzu SQL with MySQL on Kubernetes and use phpMyAdmin to interact with our
database secured with TLS
VMware Tanzu SQL with MySQL for Kubernetes is quite a mouthful. For this post, I’ll refer to the product as Tanzu SQL/MySQL. We’re going to deploy it onto an existing Tanzu Kubernetes Grid cluster.
Objectives:
Deploy Tanzu SQL with MySQL on Kubernetes
Use phpMyAdmin to interact with our databases
Secure database instances with TLS
Cluster Setup
Tanzu SQL/MySQL can run on any conformant kubernetes cluster, if you already have one running, you can skip ahead. If, like me, you want to provision a new TKG cluster for Tanzu SQL/MySQL, you’ll want settings like this:
K8s version 1.18 or 1.19 or 1.20.7
Additional volume on /var/lib/containerd for the images
For a test cluster, best-effort small control-plane nodes (3) and best-effort-medium worker nodes (2) is sufficient to start, YMMV.
Install metrics-server and add appropriate PSPs
Get the images and chart
You’ll need to login to pivnet and registry.pivotal.io, accept the EULA for VMware Tanzu SQL with MySQL for Kubernetes.
At a command-line, run:docker login registry.pivotal.io then, provide your credentials. This is so that docker can pull down the images from VMware. Login to your local container registry as well – you’ll need permissions to push images into your project.
In the following commands, replace “{local repo}” with the FQDN for your local registry and “{project}” with the project name in that repo that you can push images to.
In the tanzu-sql-with-mysql-operator folder created by the helm export, copy values.yaml to values-override.yaml. Edit the keys with the correct values (we haven’t created the harbor secret yet, but we’ll name it the value you provide here). Here’s an example:
imagePullSecret: harbor
operatorImage: {local repo}/{project}/tanzu-mysql-operator:1.0.0"
instanceImage: {local repo}/{project}/tanzu-mysql-instance:1.0.0"
resources:
limits:
cpu: 100m
memory: 128Mi
requests:
cpu: 100m
memory: 128Mi
Deploy Operator
We’ll want to create namespace, a docker-registry secret (named harbor in the example below) and then install the chart.
Let’s check that the pods are running by running kubectl get po -n tanzu-mysql
Before Creating an Instance…
We’ll need to create a namespace to put our mysql instances, a secret in that namespace in order to pull the images from our local repo, and a way to create TLS certificates and phpMyAdmin. These commands will create the namespace, create the docker-registry secret and install cert-manager:
Cert-manager uses issuers to create certificates from cert-requests. There are a variety of issuers supported, but we must have the ca certificate included in the resulting certificate secret – something not all issuers do. For example, self-signed and ACME are not suitable as they do not appear to include the ca certificate in the cert secret. Luckily, the CA issuer works fine and can use a self-signed issuer as its own signer. Save the following as a yaml file to create a self-signed issuer, root cert and a CA issuer and apply it with kubectl -n mysql-instances -f cabootstrap.yaml
Save the following as cert.yaml and apply it with kubectl -n mysql-instances -f cert.yaml to create a certificate for our instance. Adjust the names to match your environment of course. Notice the issuerRef.name is ca-issuer
apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
kind: Certificate
metadata:
name: mysql-tls-secret
spec:
# Secret names are always required.
secretName: mysql-tls-secret
duration: 2160h # 90d
renewBefore: 360h # 15d
subject:
organizations:
- ragazzilab.com
# The use of the common name field has been deprecated since 2000 and is
# discouraged from being used.
commonName: mysql-tls.mydomain.local
dnsNames:
- mysql-tls.mydomain.local
- mysql-tls
- mysql-tls.mysql-instances.svc.cluster.local
# Issuer references are always required.
issuerRef:
name: ca-issuer
# We can reference ClusterIssuers by changing the kind here.
# The default value is Issuer (i.e. a locally namespaced Issuer)
kind: Issuer
# This is optional since cert-manager will default to this value however
# if you are using an external issuer, change this to that issuer group.
group: cert-manager.io
Confirm that the corresponding secret contains three files: ca.crt, tls.crt, tls.key by using kubectl describe secret -n mysql-instances mysql-tls-secret
Create an instance and add a user
Here is an example yaml for a MySQL instance. This will create an instance name mysql-tls, using the docker-registry secret named harbor we created earlier and the certificate secret we created above named mysql-tls-secret and use a LoadBalancer IP so we can access it from outside of the cluster.
apiVersion: with.sql.tanzu.vmware.com/v1
kind: MySQL
metadata:
name: mysql-tls
spec:
storageSize: 2Gi
imagePullSecret: harbor
#### Set the storage class name to change storage class of the PVC associated with this resource
storageClassName: tanzu
#### Set the type of Service used to provide access to the MySQL database.
serviceType: LoadBalancer # Defaults to ClusterIP
### Set the name of the Secret used for TLS
tls:
secret:
name: mysql-tls-secret
Apply this yaml to the mysql-instances namespace to create the instance: kubectl apply -n mysql-instances -f ./mysqlexample.yaml
Watch for two containers in the pod to be ready
Watch for the mysql-tls-0 pod to be running with 2 containers. When the instance is created, the operator also creates a secret containing the root password. Retrieve the root password with this command: kubectl get secret -n mysql-instances mysql-tls-credentials -o jsonpath='{.data.rootPassword}' | base64 -D Retrieve the load-balancer address for the MySQL instance with this command: kubectl get svc -n mysql-instances mysql-tls
LoadBalancer address for our instance
Login to Pod and run mysql commands
Logging into the pod, then into mysql
Run this to get into a command prompt on the mysql pod: kubectl -n mysql-instances exec --stdin --tty pod/mysql-tls-0 -c mysql -- /bin/bash Once in the pod and at a prompt, run this to get into the mysql cli as root: mysql -uroot -p<root password> Once at the mysql prompt, run this to create a user named “admin” with a password set to “password” (PLEASE use a different password!)
CREATE USER 'admin'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON * . * TO 'admin'@'%';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Type exit twice to get out of mysql and the pod.
Ok, so now, we have a running instance of mysql and we’ve created a user account that can manage it (cannot login remotely as root).
Deploy, Configure and use phpMyAdmin
There are several ways to do this, but I’m going to go with kubeapps to deploy phpMyAdmin. Run this to install kubeapps with a loadbalancer front-end:
Find the External IP address for kubeapps and point a browser at it: kubectl get svc -n kubeapps kubeapps. Get the token from your .kube/config file to paste into the token field in kubeapps and click submit. Once in kubeapps, be sure to select the kubeapps namespace – you should see kubeapps itself under Applications.
logged into kubeapps in the kubeapps namespace
Click “Catalog” and type “phpmyadmin” into the search field. Click on the phpmyadmin box that results. On the next page, describing phpmyadmin, click the Blue deploy button.
Now, you should be looking at a configuration yaml for phpmyadmin. First, set the Name up top to something meaningful, like phpmyadmin, the scroll down to line 256, you should see the service type currently set to ClusterIP, replace ClusterIP with LoadBalancer.
Set the name and service type
Then scroll the rest of the way to click the blue “Deploy X.Y.Z” button and hang tight. After it deploys, the Access URLs will show the IP address for phpMyAdmin.
Access URLs for phpmyadmin after deployment
Click the Access URL to get to the Login page for phpMyAdmin and supply the IP Address of the mysql instance as well as the admin username and password we created above, then click Go.
Login to instance IP with the account we made earlier
Now you should be able to manage the databases and objects in the mysql instance!
phpmyadmin connected to our instance!
Notes
Kubernetes v1.20. There are filesystem permissions set on Tanzu Kubernetes Grid image 1.20.2 that prevent the MySQL instance pods from running. On TKG or vSphere with Tanzu, use v1.20.7 instead.
You don’t have to use cert-manager if you have another source for TLS certificates, just put the leaf cert, private key and ca cert into the secret referenced by the mysql instance yaml.
Looks like you can reuse the TLS cert for multiple databases, just keep in mind that if you connect using a name/fqdn that is not in the cert’s dnsNames, you may be a cert error.
This example uses Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service in vSphere with Tanzu on vSphere 7 Update 2 using NSX-ALB.
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid includes and supports packages for dex and Gangway. These are used to extend authentication to LDAP and OIDC endpoints. Recall that Kubernetes does not do user-management or traditional authentication. As a K8s cluster admin, you can create service accounts of course, but those are not meant to be used by developers.
Think of dex as a transition layer, it uses ‘connectors’ for upstream Identity providers (IdP) like Active Directory for LDAP or Okta for SAML and presents an OpenID Connect (OIDC) endpoint for k8s to use.
TKG provides not only the packages mentioned above, but also a collection of yaml files and documentation for implementation. The current version (as of May 12, 2020) documentation for configuring authentication is pretty general, the default values in the config files are suitable for OpenLDAP. So, I thought I’d share the specific settings for connecting dex to Active Directory.
Assumptions:
TKG Management cluster is deployed
Following the VMware documentation
Using the TKG-provided tkg-extensions
dex will be deployed to management cluster or to a specific workload cluster
Edits to authentication/dex/vsphere/ldap/03-cm.yaml – from Docs
Replace <MGMT_CLUSTER_IP> with the IP address of one of the control plane nodes of your management cluster. This is one of the control plane nodes where we’re putting dex
If the LDAP server is listening on the default port 636, which is the secured configuration, replace <LDAP_HOST> with the IP or DNS address of your LDAP server. If the LDAP server is listening on any other port, replace <LDAP_HOST> with the address and port of the LDAP server, for example 192.168.10.22:389 or ldap.mydomain.com:389. Never, never, never use unencrypted LDAP. You’ll need to specify port 636 unless your targeted AD controller is also a Global Catalog server in which case you’ll specify port 3269. Check with the AD team if you’re unsure.
If your LDAP server is configured to listen on an unsecured connection, uncomment insecureNoSSL: true. Note that such connections are not recommended as they send credentials in plain text over the network. Never, never, never use unencrypted LDAP.
Update the userSearch and groupSearch parameters with your LDAP server configuration. This need much more detail – see steps below
Edits to authentication/dex/vsphere/ldap/03-cm.yaml – AD specific
Obtain the root CA public certificate for your AD controller. Save a base64-encoded version of the certificate: echo root64.cer | base64 > rootcer.b64 for example will write the data from the PEM-encoded root64.cer file into a base64-encoded file named rootcer.b64
Add the base64-encoded certificate content to the rootCAData key. Be sure to remove the leading “#”. This is an alternative to using the rootCA key, where we’ll have to place the file on each Control Plane node
Update the userSearch values as follows:
key
default
set to
notes
baseDN
ou=people,
dc=vmware,dc=com
DN of OU in AD under
which user accounts are found
Example: ou=User Accounts,DC=ragazzilab,DC=com
filter
“(objectClass=
posixAccount)”
“(objectClass=person)”
username
uid
userPrincipalName
idAttr
uid
DN
Case-sensitive
emailAttr
mail
userPrincipalName
nameAttr
givenName
cn
Update the groupSearch values as follows:
key
default
set to
notes
baseDN
ou=people,
dc=vmware,dc=com
DN of OU in AD under
which security Groups are found
Example: DC=ragazzilab,DC=com
filter
“(objectClass=
posixGroup)”
“(objectClass=group)”
userAttr
uid
DN
Case-Sensitive
groupAttr
memberUid
“member:1.2.840.113556.1.4.1941:”
This is necessary to search within nested groups in AD
nameAttr
cn
cn
Other important Notes
When you create the oidc secret in the workload clusters running Gangway, the clientSecret value is base64-encoded, but the corresponding secret for the workload cluster in the staticClients section of the dex configmMap is decoded. This can be confusing since the decoded value is also randomly-generated.
Login to Harbor Web GUI as an administrator. Navigate to Administration/Registries
Add Endpoint for local Harbor by clicking ‘New Endpoint’ and entering the following:
Provider: harbor
Name: local (or FQDN or whatever)
Description: optional
Endpoint URL: the actual URL for your harbor instance beginning with https and ending with :443
Access ID: username for an admin or user that at least has Project Admin permission to the target Projects/namespaces
Access Secret: Password for the account above
Verify Remote Cert: typically checked
Add Endpoint for Docker Hub by clicking ‘New Endpoint’ and entering the following:
Provider: docker-hub
Name: dockerhub (or something equally profound)
Description: optional
Endpoint URL: pre-populated/li>
Access ID: username for your account at dockerhub
Access Secret: Password for the account above
Verify Remote Cert: typically checked
Notice that this is for general dockerhub, not targeting a particular repo.
Configure Replications for the Yelb Images
You may create replications for several images at once using a variety of filters, but I’m going to create a replication rule for each image we need. I think this makes it easier to identify a problem, removes the risk of replicating too much and makes administration easier. Click ‘New Replication Rule‘ enter the following to create our first rule:
Name: yelb-db-0.5
Description: optional
Replication Mode: Pull-based (because we’re pulling the image from DockerHub)
Source registry: dockerhub
Source Registry Filter – Name: mreferre/yelb-db
Source Registry Filter – Tag: 0.5
Source Registry Filter – Resource: pre-populated
Destination Namespace: yelb (or whatever Project you want the images saved to)
Trigger Mode: Select ‘Manual’ for a one-time sync or select ‘Scheduled’ if you want to ensure the image is replicated periodically. Note that the schedule format is cron with seconds, so 0 0 23 * * 5 would trigger the replication to run every Friday at 23:00:00. Scheduled replication makes sense when the tag filter is ‘latest’ for example
Override: leave checked to overwrite the image if it already exists
Enable rule: leave checked to keep the rule enabled
Add the remaining Replication Rules:
Name
Name Filter
Tag Filter
Dest Namespace
yelb-ui-latest
mreferre/yelb-ui
latest
yelb
yelb-appserver-latest
mreferre/yelb-appserver
latest
yelb
redis-4.0.2
library/redis
4.0.2
yelb
Note that redis is an official image, so we have to include library/
I confess, most of my experience with Kubernetes is with Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Enterprise. PKS makes it rather easy to get started and I found that I took some tasks for granted.
In PKS Enterprise, one can use the pks cli to not only life-cycle clusters, but to obtain the credentials to the cluster and automatically update the kubeconfig with the account information. So, administrative/operations users can run the command “pks get-credentials my-cluster” to have a kubeconfig updated with the authentication tokens and parameters to connect to my-cluster.
K8s OIDC using UAA on PKS
The PKS controller includes the User Account and Authentication (UAA) component, which is used to authenticate users into PKS Enterprise. UAA can also be easily configured to connect to an existing LDAP service – this is the desired configuration in most organizations so that users account exist in one place (Active Directory in my example).
So, I found myself wondering “I don’t want to provide the PKS CLI to developers, so how can they connect kubectl to the cluster?”
Assumptions:
PKS Enterprise on vSphere (with or without NSX-T)
Active Directory
Developer user account belongs to the k8s-devs security group in AD
Prerequisite configuration:
UAA on PKS configured a with UAA User Account Store: LDAP Server. This links UAA to LDAP/Active Directory
User Search Filter: userPrincipalName={0} This means that users can login as user@domain.tld
Group Search Filter: member={0} This ensures that AD groups may be used rather than specifying individual users
Configure created clusters to use UAA as the OIDC provider: Enabled This pre-configures the kubernetes API to use OpenID Connect with UAA. If not using PKS Enterprise, you’ll need to provide another OpenID Connect-Compliant endpoint (like Dex), link it to Active Directory and update the kubernetes cluster api manually to use the OpenID Authentication.
Operator: Create Role and RoleBinding:
While authentication is handled by OIDC/UAA/LDAP, Authorization must be configured on the cluster to provide access to resources via RBAC. This is done by defining a Role (or clusterRole) that indicates what actions may be taken on what resources and a RoleBinding which links the Role to one or more “subjects”.
Authenticate to kubernetes cluster with an administrative account (for example, using PKS cli to connect)
Create yaml file for our Role and RoleBinding:
kind: Role
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
name: developers
rules:
- apiGroups: ["", "extensions", "apps"]
resources: ["deployments", "replicasets", "pods"]
verbs: ["get", "list", "watch", "create", "update", "patch", "delete"]
# You can also use ["*"]
---
kind: RoleBinding
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1
metadata:
name: developer-dev-binding
subjects:
- kind: Group
name: k8s-devs
apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
roleRef:
kind: Role
name: developers
apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
In the example above, we’re creating a Role named “developers”, granting access to the core, extensions and apps API groups and several actions against deployments, replicaSets and pods. Notice that developers in this role would have have access to secrets (for example)
The example RoleBinding binds a group named “k8s-devs” to the developers role. Notice that we have not created the k8s-devs group in Kubernetes or UAA; it exists in Active Directory
Use Kubectl to apply the yaml, creating the Role and Rolebinding in the targeted namespace
Creating the kubeconfig – the hard way
To get our developer connected with kubectl, they’ll need a kubeconfig with the authentication and connection details. The Hard way steps are:
Operator obtains the cluster’s certificate authority data. This can be done via curl or by copying the value from the existing kubeconfig.
Operator creates a template kubeconfig, replacing the value specified, then sends it to the developer user
The developer user obtains the id_token and refresh_token from UAA, via a curl command curl 'https://PKS-API:8443/oauth/token' -k -XPOST -H
'Accept: application/json' -d "client_id=pks_cluster_client&client_secret=""&grant_type=password&username=UAA-USERNAME&response_type=id_token" --data-urlencode password=UAA-PASSWORD
The developer user updates the kubeconfig with the id_token and refresh token in the kubeconfig
Creating the kubeconfig – the easy way
Assuming the developer is using Mac or Linux…
Install jq on developer workstation
Download the get-pks-k8s-config.sh script, make it executable (chmod +x get-pks.k8s.config.sh)
Execute the script (replace the params with your own)
First, some background – I promise to keep it short. You should never have credentials in a public github repo. Probably not good to have them in a private repo either. At Pivotal, the github client is configured with credalert which complains when I try to push credentials to github. I maintain compliance, I needed a way to update the stuff in the repo and have my credentials too. Concourse supports a couple of AWS credential managers, Vault and Credhub. Since CredHub is built-in to ops-manager-deployed BOSH director, we don’t have to spin anything else up.
The simplified diagram shows how this will work. CredHub is on the BOSH director, so it’ll need to be reachable from the Concourse Web ATS service and anywhere the credhub cli will be used. If your BOSH director is behind a NAT, you may want to configure a DNAT, so it can be reached.
In this case, we’re using a “management/infrastructure” Operations Manager and BOSH director to deploy and manage concourse and minio. The pipelines on concourse will be used to deploy and maintain other foundations in the environment.
Configure UAA
Logon to the ops manager and navigate to status to record the IP address of the BOSH director. If your BOSH director is behind a NAT, locate it’s DNAT instead.
Navigate to the credentials tab. We’re going to need the uaa_login_client_credentials password and the uaa_admin_client_credentials password.
While here, save the ops manager root ca to your computer. From the installation dashboard, click on your name in the upper right, select Settings. Then click Advanced and Download Root CA.
SSH into your ops manager: ubuntu@<ops manager name or IP>
Set uaac target
uaac target https://<IP of BOSH director>:8443 –ca-cert /var/tempest/workspaces/default/root_ca_certificate
Login to uaac – ok, this gets awkward
uaac token owner get login -s <uaa_login_client_credentials>
Replace <uaa_login_client_credentials> with the value you saved
When prompted for a username enter admin
For password enter the uaa_admin_client_password value you saved
You should see “Successfully fetched token…”
Create a uaac client for concourse to use with credhub
Please replace MySecretPassword with something else
Create a uaac user for use with the CredHub cli
uaac user add credhub –email credhub@whatever.com -p MySecretPassword
Try out Credhub cli
Download and install the credhub cli. On mac, you can use brew install credhub
From a terminal/command line run this to point the cli to the credhub instance on the BOSH director:
credhub api -s <IP of BOSH director>:8844 –ca-cert ./root_ca_certificate
Replace <IP of BOSH director> with the name or reachable IP of the director
root_ca_certificate is the root CA from ops manager you downloaded earlier
Login to credhub:
credhub login -u credhub -p MySecretPassword
User and pass are from the User we added to uaa earlier
Set a test value:
credhub –type:value –name=/testval –value=hello
Here’s we’re setting a key (aka credential) with the name /testval to the value “hello”. Note that all the things stored in credhub start with a slash and that there are several types of credentials that can be stored, the simplest being “value”
Get our value:
credhub –name /testval
This will return the metadata for our key/credential
Configuring Concourse to use CredHub
Concourse TSA must be configured to look to credhub as a credential manager. I’m using BOSH-deployed concourse, so I’ll simply update the deployment manifest with the new params. if you’re using concourse via docker-compose, you’ll want to update the yml with the additional params as described here.
For concourse deployed via BOSH and using concouse-bosh-deployment, we’ll include the /operations/credhub.yml file and the additional params. For me this looks like
So, you’ve installed PKS and created a PKS cluster. Excellent! Now what?
We want to use helm charts to deploy applications. Many of the charts use PersistentVolumes, so getting PVs set up is our first step.
There are a couple of complicating factors to be aware of when it comes to PVs in a multi-AZ/multi-vSphere-Cluster environment. First, you probably have cluster-specific datastores – particularly if you are using Pivotal Ready Architecture and VSAN. These datastores are not suitable for PersistentVolumes consumed by applications deployed to our Kubernetes cluster. To work-around this, we’ll need to provide some shared block storage to each host in each cluster. Probably the simplest way to do this is with an NFS share.
Prerequisites:
Common datastore; NFS share or iSCSI
In production, you’ll want a production-quality fault-tolerant solution for NFS or iSCSI, like Dell EMC Isilon. For this proof-of-concept, I’m going to use an existing NFS server, create a volume and share it to the hosts in the three vSphere clusters where the PKS workload VMs will run. In this case, the NFS datastore is named “sharednfs” ’cause I’m creative like that. Make sure that your hosts have adequate permissions to the share. Using VMFS on iSCSI is supported, just be aware that you may need to cable-up additional NICs if yours are already consumed by N-VDS and/or VSAN.
Workstation Prep
We’ll need a handful of command-line tools, so make sure your workstation has the PKS CLI and Kubectl CLI from Pivotal and you’ve downloaded and extracted Helm.
PKS Cluster
We’ll want to provision a cluster using the PKS CLI tool. This document assumes that your cluster was provisioned successfully, but nothing else has been done to it. For my environment, I configured the “medium” plan to use 3 Masters and 3 Workers in all three AZs, then created the cluster with the command
Where “pks1cl1″ is replaced by your cluster’s name,”api.pks1.lab13.myenv.lab” is replaced by the FQDN to your PKS API server, “pksadmin” is replaced by the username with admin rights to PKS and “my_password” is replaced with that account’s password.
Procedure:
Create storageclass
Create storageclass spec yaml. Note that the file is named storageclass-nfs.yml and we’re naming the storage class itself “nfs”:
Create a sample PVC (Persistent Volume Claim). Note that the file is names pvc-sample.yml, the PVC name is “pvc-sample” and uses the “nfs” storageclass we created above. This step is not absolutely necessary, but will help confirm we can use the storage.
Look for a version number for the version; note that it might take a few seconds for tiller in the cluster to get ready.
Deploy sample helm chart
Update helm local chart repository. We do this so that we can be sure that helm can reach the public repo and to cache teh latest information to our local repo.
helm repo update
If this step results in a certificate error, you may have to add the cert to the trusted certificates on the workstation.
Install helm chart with ingress enabled. Here, I’ve selected the Dokuwiki app. The command below will enable ingress, so we can access it via routable IP and it will use the default storageclass we configured earlier.
Edit – April 23 2019 – Passing the credentials in here makes connecting easier later.
Confirm that the app was deployed
helm list
kubectl get pods -n default
kubectl get services -n default
From the get services results, make a note of the external IP address – in the example above, it’s 192.13.6.73
Point a browser at the external address from the previous step and marvel at your success in deploying Dokuwiki via helm to Kubernetes! If you want to actually login to your Dokuwiki instance, first obtain the password for the user account with this command:
Then login with username “user” and that password.
Edit – 04/23/19 – Login with the username and password you included in the helm install command
Additional info
View Persistent Volume Claims with
kubectl get pvc -n default
This will list the PVCs and the volumes in the “default” namespace. Note the volume corresponds to the name of the VMDK on the datastore.
Load-Balancer
Notice that since we are leveraging the NSX-T Container Networking Interface and enabled the ingress when we installed dokuwiki, a load-balancer in NSX-T was automatically created for us to point to the application.
This took me some time to figure out; had to weed through a lot of documentation – some of which contradicted itself and quite a bit of trial-and-error. I hope this helps save someone time later!
Last night, Pivotal announced new versions of PKS and Harbor, so I thought it’s time to simplify the upgrade process. Here is a concourse pipeline that essentially aggregates the upgrade-tile pipeline so that PKS and Harbor are upgraded in one go.
What it does:
Runs on a schedule – you set the time and days it may run
Downloads the latest version of PKS and Harbor from Pivnet- you set the major.minor version range
Uploads the PKS and Harbor releases to your BOSH director
Determines whether the new release is missing a stemcell, downloads it from PivNet and uploads it to BOSH director
Stages the tiles/releases
Applies changes
What you need:
A working Concourse instance that is able to reach the Internet to pull down the binaries and repo
Edit the params.yml by replacing the values in double-parentheses with the actual value. Each line has a bit explaining what it’s expecting. For example, ((ops_mgr_host)) becomes opsmgr.pcf1.domain.local
Remove the parens
If you have a GitHub Token, pop that value in, otherwise remove ((github_token))
The current pks_major_minor_version regex will get the latest 1.0.x. If you want to pin it to a specific version, or when PKS 1.1.x is available, you can make those changes here.
The ops_mgr_usr and ops_mgr_pwd credentials are those you use to logon to Ops Manager itself. Typically set when the Ops Manager OVA is deployed.
The schedule params should be adjusted to a convenient time to apply the upgrade. Remember that in addition to the PKS Service being offline (it’s a singleton) during the upgrade, your Kubernetes clusters may be affected if you have the “Upgrade all Clusters” errand set to run in the PKS configuration, so schedule wisely!
Set the new pipeline. Here, I’m naming the pipeline “PKS_Upgrade”. You’ll pass the pipeline.yml with the “-c” param and your edited params.yml with the “-l” param
Unpause the pipeline so it can run when in the scheduled window
fly -t concourse up -p PKS_Upgrade
Login to the Concourse web to see our shiny new pipeline!
If you don’t want to deal with the schedule and simply want it to upgrade on-demand, use the pipeline-nosched.yml instead of pipeline.yml, just be aware that when you unpause the pipeline, it’ll start doing its thing. YMMV, but for me, it took about 8 minutes to complete the upgrade.
Behind the scenes
It’s not immediately obvious how the pipeline does what it does. When I first started out, I found it frustrating that there just isn’t much to the pipeline itself. To that end, I tried making pipelines that were entirely self-contained. This was good in that you can read the pipeline and see everything it’s doing; plus it can be made to run in an air-gapped environment. The downside is that there is no separation, one error in any task and you’ll have to edit the whole pipeline file.
As I learned a little more and poked around in what others were doing, it made sense to split the “tasks” out, keep them in a GitHub public repo and pull it down to run on-demand.
Pipelines generally have two main sections; resources and jobs. Resources are objects that are used by jobs. In this case, the binary installation files, a zip of the GitHub repo and the schedule are resources. Jobs are (essentially) made up of plans and plans have tasks.
Each task in most pipelines uses another source yml. This task.yml will indicate which image concourse should build a container from and what it should do on that container (typically, run a script). All of these task components are in the GitHub repo, so when the pipeline job runs, it clones the repo and runs the appropriate task script in a container built on an image pulled from dockerhub.
More info
I’ve got a several pipelines in the repo. Some of them do what they’re supposed to. 🙂 Most of them are derived from others’ work, so many thanks to Pivotal Services and Sabha Parameswaran
I’ve fought with PKS and NSX-T for a month or so now. I’ll admit it: I did everything wrong, several times. One thing for certain, I know how NOT to configure it. So, now that I’ve finally gotten past my configuration issues, it makes sense to share the pain lessons learned.
Set your expectations correctly. PKS is literally a 1.0 product right now. It’s getting a lot of attention and will make fantastic strides very quickly, but for now, it can be cumbersome and confusing. The documentation is still pretty raw. Similarly, NSX-T is very young. The docs are constantly referring you to the REST API instead of the GUI – this is fine of course, but is a turn-off for many. The GUI has many weird quirks. (when entering a tag, you’ll have to tab off of the value field after entering a value, since it is only checked onBlur)
Use Chrome Incognito NSX-T does not work in Firefox on Windows. It works in Chrome, but I had issues where the cache would problems (the web GUI would indicate that backup is not configured until I closed Chrome, cleared cache and logged in again)
Do not use exclamation point in the NSX-T admin password Yep, learned that the hard way. Supposedly, this is resolved in PKS 1.0.3, but I’m not convinced as my environment did not wholly cooperate until I reset the admin password to something without an exclamation point in it
Tag only one IP Pool with ncp/external I needed to build out several foundations on this environment and wanted to keep them in discrete IP space by created multiple “external IP Pools” and assigning each to its own foundation. Currently the nsx-cli.sh script that accompanies PKS with NSX-T only looks for the “ncp/external” tag on IP Pools, if more than one is found, it quits. I suppose you could work around this by forking the script and passing an additional “cluster” param, but I’m certain that the NSBU is working on something similar
Do not take a snapshot of the NSX Manager This applies to NSX for vSphere and NSX-T, but I have made this mistake and it was costly. If your backup solution relies on snapshots (pretty much all of them do), be sure to exclude the NSX Manager and…
Configure scheduled backups of NSX Manager I found the docs for this to be rather obtuse. Spent a while trying to configure a FileZilla SFTP or even IIS-FTP server until it finally dawned on me that it really is just FTP over SSH. So, the missing detail for me was that you’ll just need a linux machine with plenty of space that the NSX Manager can connect to – over SSH – and dump files to. I started with this procedure, but found that the permissions were too restrictive.
Use concourse pipelines This was an opportunity for me to really dig into concourse pipelines and embrace what can be done. One moment of frustration came when PKS 1.0.3 was released and I discovered that the parameters for vSphere authentication had changed. In PKS 1.0 through 1.0.2, there was a single set of credentials to be used by PKS to communicate with vCenter Server. As of 1.0.3, this was split into credentials for master and credentials for workers. So, the pipeline needed a tweak in order to complete the install. I ended up putting in a conditional to check the release version, so the right params are populated. If interested, my pipelines can be found at https://github.com/BrianRagazzi/concourse-pipelines
Count your Load-Balancers In NSX-T, the load-balancers can be considered a sort of empty appliance that Virtual Servers are attached to and can itself attach to a Logical Router. The load-balancers in-effect require pre-allocated resources that must come from an Edge Cluster. The “small” load-balancer consumes 2 CPU and 4GB RAM and the “Large” edge VM provides 8 CPU and 16GB RAM. So, a 2-node Edge Cluster can support up to FOUR active/standby Load-Balancers. This quickly becomes relevant when you realize that PKS creates a new load-balancer when a new K8s cluster is created. If you get errors in the diego databse with the ncp job when creating your fifth k8s cluster, you might need to add a few more edge nodes to the edge cluster.
Configure your NAT rules as narrow as you can. I wasted a lot of time due to mis-configured NAT rules. The log data from provisioning failures did not point to NAT mis-configuration, so wild geese were chased. Here’s what finally worked for me:
Router
Priority
Action
Source
Destination
Translated
Description
Tier1 PKS Management
512
No NAT
[PKS Management CIDR]
[PKS Service CIDR]
Any
No NAT between management and services
[PKS Service CIDR]
[PKS Management CIDR]
1024
DNAT
Any
[External IP for Ops Manager]
[Internal IP for Ops Manager]
So Ops Manager is reachable
[External IP for PKS Service]
[Internal IP for PKS Service] (obtain from Status tab of PKS in Ops Manager)
So PKS Service (and UAA) is reachable
SNAT
[Internal IP for PKS Service]
Any
[External IP for PKS Service]
Return Traffic for PKS Service
2048
[PKS Management CIDR]
[Infrastructure CIDR] (vCenter Server, NSX Manager, DNS Servers)
[External IP for Ops Manager]
So PKS Management can reach infrastructure
[PKS Management CIDR]
[Additional Infrastructure] (NTP in this case)
[External IP for Ops Manager]
Tier1 PKS Services
512
No NAT
[PKS Service CIDR]
[PKS Management CIDR]
Any
No NAT between management and services
[PKS Management CIDR]
[PKS Service CIDR]
1024
SNAT
[PKS Service CIDR]
[Infrastructure CIDR] (vCenter Server, NSX Manager, DNS Servers)
[External IP] (not the same as Ops Manager and PKS Service, but in the same L3 network)
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid includes and supports packages for dex and Gangway. These are used to extend authentication to LDAP and OIDC endpoints. Recall that Kubernetes does not do user-management or traditional authentication. As a K8s cluster admin, you can create service accounts of course, but those are not meant to be used by developers.
I found the documentation for actually replicating images from DockerHub to a local Harbor instance to be missing. So here’s what I’ve found:
So, you’ve installed PKS and created a PKS cluster. Excellent! Now what?
Brian Ragazzi 