November 2017 – Ifrit LTD

Installing Kubernetes on MacOS

Published November 28, 2017

I am assuming you have virtualbox installed on your Mac.

To test most of the stuff on k8s you don’t need multiple nodes, running one node cluster is pretty much what you need.

First we need to install kubectl, a tool to interact with kubernetes cluster:

➜  ~ curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/`curl -s \
  https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/stable.txt`/bin/darwin/amd64/kubectl \
  && chmod +x ./kubectl \
  && sudo mv ./kubectl /usr/local/bin/kubectl

Then we need Minikube – which is a tool that provisions and manages single-node Kubernetes clusters:

➜  ~ curl -Lo minikube https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/v0.23.0/minikube-darwin-amd64 \
  && chmod +x minikube \
  && sudo mv minikube /usr/local/bin/

Now we can start the VM:

➜  ~ minikube  start
Starting local Kubernetes v1.8.0 cluster...
Starting VM...
Downloading Minikube ISO
 140.01 MB / 140.01 MB [============================================] 100.00% 0s
Getting VM IP address...
Moving files into cluster...
Downloading localkube binary
 148.56 MB / 148.56 MB [============================================] 100.00% 0s
Setting up certs...
Connecting to cluster...
Setting up kubeconfig...
Starting cluster components...
Kubectl is now configured to use the cluster.

Let’s check everything is working:

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Creating Kubernetes Jobs.

Creating Kubernetes Jobs.

Published November 27, 2017

Sometimes you need to run a container to execute a specific task and then stop it.

Normally in Kubernetes, if you try just to run it, it will actually create a deployment,
meaning you container will keep running all the time. That is because by default kubectl runs with ‘–restart=”Always”‘ policy.
So if you don’t want to create a yaml file where you specify pod ‘kind’ as a Job, but simply use kubectl run, you can set restart policy to ‘OnFailure’.
Let’s run simple container as a job. It is a simple web crawler which I have written for one of my job interviews, it has many bugs and incomplete,
but sometimes it actually works 🙂 So let’s run it:

➜  ~ kubectl run crawler --restart=OnFailure --image=kayan/web-crawler \
 -- http://www.gamesyscorporate.com http://www.gamesyscorporate.com 3
job "crawler" created

Now we can check the state of the pod:

➜  ~ kubectl get pod
NAME            READY     STATUS              RESTARTS   AGE
crawler-k57bh   0/1       ContainerCreating   0          2s

it will take a while, as it needs to download the image first, to check run:

kubectl describe pod crawler

You should see something like below:

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Running smallest test http server container

Running smallest test http server container

Published November 26, 2017

Sometimes we want to quickly run some container and check http connection to it, I use to use nginx for this.
If your internet connection is not super fast, or if you want something really really quick, or nginx just doesn’t work for you
for some reason, here is what you can use – a combination of busybox and netcat:

➜  ~ docker run -d --rm -p 8080:8080 --name webserver busybox \
	 sh -c "while true; do { echo -e 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\n'; \
	 echo 'smallest http server'; } | nc -l -p  8080; done"
	 
031cb2f4c0ecab22b3af574ab09a28dbfcb9e654e9a2d04fb421bb7ebacdff1f

➜  ~ curl localhost:8080
smallest http server

Lets check it’s size:

➜  ~ docker images nginx | grep alpine
nginx               1.13.6-alpine       5c6da346e3d6        3 weeks ago         15.5MB
➜  ~
➜  ~
➜  ~ docker images busybox
REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
busybox             latest              6ad733544a63        3 weeks ago         1.13MB
➜  ~

It is just 1Mb as oppose to 15Mb for nginx alpine.

You can run same on Kubernetes as described below:

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Setting up Firewall and network troubleshooting in Linux with UFW, lsof, tcpdump, wireshark, rsyslog and vagrant

Setting up Firewall and network troubleshooting in Linux with UFW, lsof, tcpdump, wireshark, rsyslog and vagrant

Published November 25, 2017

In this article I am going to demonstrate how to restrict incoming connections to specific port in Ubuntu Linux. Then we will see how to check the logs on the server side for rejected client connection attempts and how to troubleshoot this issue from clients perspective by analysing TCP packets.

By the end you should be more familiar with UFW(Uncomplicated Firewall), lsof, tcpdump and TCP Three-way handshake analysis, Wireshark, nc, rsyslog, telnet, vagrant.

The Article assumes you have VirtualBox and vagrant installed, if you haven’t google it, it is very easy to setup.

First thing first, you will need to setup 2 VMs, alternatively you can use the host as the client, given you can
use tcpdump on it:

cat Vagrantfile
Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|

  config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant"

  config.vm.define "sensu" do |m|
          m.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
          m.vm.hostname = "sensu"
          m.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.2.212"
          m.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |v|
            v.memory = 1024
          end
  end

  config.vm.define "sensuclient" do |m|
          m.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
          m.vm.hostname = "sensuclient"
          m.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.2.213"
          m.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |v|
            v.memory = 512
          end
  end

end  %

I have two servers now, sensu will be the server side and sensuclient will be the one connecting to sensu server.

I now have got two VMs, lets start them and then connect to server first:

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Implementing Service Discovery with Consul, Registrator and Nginx in a Dockerized environment.

Implementing Service Discovery with Consul, Registrator and Nginx in a Dockerized environment.

Published November 3, 2017

Today we are going to look at how we can benefit from modern devops tools to implement simple Service Discovery.
What is Service Discovery? To put it very simply, it is a combinations of scripts or tools which can help to discover certain
properties of a deployable applications, like IP address, port, etc, so deployment could be automated.

I remember in one of my previous jobs, we use to come to office at 6am for the release. It was fun…
So the ops guys would configure the reverse proxy with all configuration required for the new app, like their ports, then add the new app, take the old application off the reverse proxy’s pool, then restart the proxy. Very tedious process. After all done, they would run many tests to confirm all is looking good. The flow would look something like on the diagram:

Nowadays you can imagine different software development world, applications running as docker containers and deployment happening multiple times a day.

Today I will try to demonstrate how to automate configuring the reverse proxy automatically, so no matter what is the IP address or port the application server is running at, all will be configured automatically, and we will only deploy the application or remove it when needed:

Service Discovery with Consul, Registrator and Nginx in a Dockerized environment

Of course it is just a concept to see how specific devops tools could be benefited from and in real life docker orchestration tools like Rancher or Kubernetes, with their embedded mechanisms, will either take care of the Service Discovery or will make it much easier.

But I just wanted to show how we can do it piece by piece, so we know what is going on and how things work.

So here is a list of the things we are going to do:

How to Dockerize simple NodeJs app
How to use Consul as service discovery tool for storing container data in a KV storage
How to use registrator as service discovery tool for inspecting containers
How to use nginx as reverse proxy
How to use Consul-template for configuring nginx automatically

We are going to start from

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Month: November 2017

Installing Kubernetes on MacOS

Creating Kubernetes Jobs.

Running smallest test http server container

Setting up Firewall and network troubleshooting in Linux with UFW, lsof, tcpdump, wireshark, rsyslog and vagrant

Implementing Service Discovery with Consul, Registrator and Nginx in a Dockerized environment.