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HA microk8s in production

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Kubernetes and Containers

Last Post by Brandon Lee 10 months ago

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mscrocdile

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Dec 26, 2023 5:42 pm

(@mscrocdile)

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Joined: 11 months ago

Hello, i just imagine if i'm able to use Microk8s in production.

Let's suppose i'll buy 3 VM's (3 is enough for my current services) somewhere (i'll take hetzner but it doesn't matter - it just have to support metallb).

I ask myself for this:

1) if i setup metallb and buy one floating ip address to make a cluster working when one node dies - is it ok that generally all the traffic goes through that one node?

2) Where to store pods data. Is rook ceph (microceph) the best , fast and reliable? Do I need it? Problems: i need to buy additional storage for this case = more expensive. I dont know how to back it up yet (it is like black box for me so far) and where - to object storage anywhere or into LAN?. What else except pod's datashould i backup? What if the whole datacenter dies? Should i use microceph(microk8s) nodes in another datacenter? What about performance then?

3) Generally, what if some part of cluster fails? Floating ip mechanism or the whole datacenter? Should i rather use cloud load balancer(does it work with metallb or without). Or should I rather buy the whole managed cloud kubernetes?

Except failover and where to save HA data i don't see it so difficult.. What do you think? What would you recommend me? I have fear some part fails and i will never restore it as quickly as in old school case without cluster. Is microk8s really easy wit microceph and am i able to manage it myself in production?

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microk8s

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Brandon Lee

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Dec 26, 2023 8:37 pm

(@brandon-lee)

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Joined: 14 years ago

@mscrocdile, great questions about running Microk8s in production, and I will take a stab at a few of your questions with Microk8s. One of the good things about Microk8s is that it has HA built-in by default for the control plane, meaning every node runs the control plane using a SQLlite DB.

With the control plane, Microk8s has an embedded datastore on the API server, Dqlite, at least 3 nodes are needed. Each API server replicates to the datastore. Also, each node is also a worker in a Microk8s cluster, so it has datastore replication and worker replication.

You can do the more traditional etcd cluster replication, but it is more complex to configure, and with Microk8s, I believe it isn't really needed.

1). With MetalLB, you should be good if you have replicas of your MetalLB pods on the other nodes in the cluster. If one node fails, the MetalLB pod should take over handling IP provisioning. Keep in mind that MetalLB handles provisioning IP addresses to your services in Kubernetes. So, your service should continue to maintain the IP address it has been assigned by MetalLB, so that ingress services will maintain their associated configurations.

(2 & 3) I think Microceph is a good solution for local replicated storage. You can do shared storage like NFS as well, or something like Rancher Longhorn, which is open-source and also a replicated storage solution with local storage on each Kubernetes node.

Veeam also makes a free backup solution called Kasten K10 for Kubernetes that allows you to back up your Pod data and store it in a number of locations, such as local or cloud object storage. Having both local and offsite backups helps to ensure you are meeting the best practices with 3-2-1 backups. More about K10 in this link:

KASTEN.IO "https://www.kasten.io/veeam"

Free Kubernetes Download: Get Veeam Kasten Now

Unlock your free Kubernetes with Veeam Kasten. Experience enterprise-grade features and seamless cloud integration. Download your free version today.

With Microk8s, you can specify the failure domain each node is in, and MicroK8s, along with dqlite will spread the voters and stand-bys....more on those:

voters: db replication, participating in leader election
standby: db replication, not participating in leader election
spare: no db replication, not participating in leader election

So with that, protecting yourself from an entire site failure is always a good idea.

Also, i would definitely recommend getting more familiar with Microk8s and the solutions you want to support in a production environment in a lab, which it sounds like you are definitely doing that. I think a lot of your comfort level with the solution will come from experience with it in the lab. I would set up some of these failure scenarios to see how the pods behave with actual services there.

Also, I want to ping @t3hbeowulf and get his input on the conversation with Kubernetes in production, as I want to make sure I am not missing something with the recommendations and would definitely like to hear his input on disaster recovery and configurations for resilient clusters that he has been involved with.

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t3hbeowulf

(@t3hbeowulf)

Joined: 11 months ago

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Posts: 24

Dec 28, 2023 8:59 pm

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Brandon Lee

@brandon-lee Thank you for the shout out. I'm going to defer to your suggestions regarding microk8s as I think you covered the OP questions effectively. My experience with microk8s has been hyper-local installations on a single node for testing. I have not used it for any sort of production application.

Professionally, I manage native k8s both on-prem and in AWS (EKS). Our on-prem clusters use k8s in a "stacked" configuration. (Basically, 3 "control" VMs running etcd for configuration sync and a varied number of separate "worker" nodes. Taints are used to keep non-system pods off of the control nodes) For routing, we use a combination of istio and nginx. For load-balancing, we use HA Proxy and/or Nginx depending on when the cluster was setup with newer clusters using nginx.

For pod configuration management, we use helm almost exclusively and persist the helm charts in the pod's source respiratory. This allows us to not care about saving cluster data about pods because they can be redeployed quickly with a helm run.

Stepping back to the spirit of the question: I personally strive to make as much of the setup and deployment automated to avoid situations were we'd have to manage a cluster like a family pet. VMs, Clusters, pods, etc should be considered cattle... make them easy to replace from configs where possible. This ensures you have a consistent state for production and allows you to test configurations in a sandbox environment.

That said, there is one tool we've used to great effect for Kubernetes backups of you' re worried about recovery from failure speed. Velero is a wonderful tool for duplicating and recreating kubernetes resources.

VELERO.IO "https://velero.io/"

Velero

Brandon Lee

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(@brandon-lee)

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Posts: 395

Dec 28, 2023 10:20 pm

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t3hbeowulf

@t3hbeowulf Excellent insights on what you manage and the technologies you guys are using. Just curious if you guys or developers ever looked into Fargate in AWS? I work with a company that is refactoring a web application and the DevOps team is using Fargate to house the containers. Curious what your thoughts are on that front as a service if you have had any experience with it. Also, are you guys using Terraform or something else for IaC?

I need to spin up Velero in the lab, that has been on my to do list Smile

@mscrocdile, I knew @t3hbeowulf would have great insights.

Posts: 33

mscrocdile

Topic starter

Dec 27, 2023 2:52 pm

(@mscrocdile)

Eminent Member

Joined: 11 months ago

Thank you for tips and information.

You are right, I must learn a lot in lab yet.

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Brandon Lee

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Dec 27, 2023 8:19 pm

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mscrocdile

@mscrocdile Yes definitely lab is the best way i have found. You are on the right track. I will do some testing in my lab as well on a few things 👍

Posts: 33

mscrocdile

Topic starter

Dec 30, 2023 3:18 am

(@mscrocdile)

Eminent Member

Joined: 11 months ago

As we say here I cannot see the wood through the trees. So i will appreciate all above as soon as i will understand it.

Let me just return to that low cost and low setup microk8s in production. I still dont understand if it is ok to have 3 nodes(3VMs) and use one floating ip as external ip of metalLB and in case one node is down it will switch to another using keepalived.

If I go another way mayby the better one and if i use external TCP haproxy load balancer (2 VM's+keepalived) then am i able to correctly configure letsencrypt in the cluster?

EXAMPLE.COM "https://example.com"

Example Domain

will go to haproxy and it forwards it then to one of the public ip's of cluster. Do i understand it well that haproxy just forwards it without touch and it will be the cluster who will have a chance to manage the rest? Or do i have to somehow implement that load balancer directly inside cluster?

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Brandon Lee

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(@brandon-lee)

Joined: 14 years ago

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Posts: 395

Dec 30, 2023 8:11 pm

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mscrocdile

@mscrocdile No worries, there are so many concepts around Kubernetes, load balancing, IP addressing, and such, that it takes time to get it all soaked in. I am still learning to be honest myself. Of course that is the story with all of us in IT I think...we never learn it all which keeps it interesting.

I think you are ok in what you are thinking with the concept of 3 VMs and 1 "external" IP address that you want to have exposed. MetalLB can be confusing too as it is what hands IP addresses to your services. Then you have an external LB that can also be in play to load balance between your Kubernetes hosts.

There is also a project that I have used and written about with K3s clusters called k3sup (pronounced "ketchup") that spins up a loadbalanced "cluster IP" that allows you to have a single IP shared between your cluster nodes.

Keep in mind too there is another layer you can throw in there with an ingress controller that basically routes application traffic to the services, based on a hostname or other labels you define.

So external IP =====> Traefik (ingress controller looks at hostname)======> forwards the traffic to the Kubernetes service that will handle the request. So instead of having MetalLB needed to hand out a bunch of IP addresses that you can point to for specific services, Traefik or Nginx proxy, etc, is the only IP you need and then it handles application routing. Does that make sense?

mscrocdile

(@mscrocdile)

Joined: 11 months ago

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Posts: 33

Jan 03, 2024 11:38 pm

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Brandon Lee

@brandon-lee

Honestly i don't know how to implement this if there is not MetalLB.

"So external IP =====> Traefik (ingress controller looks at hostname)======> forwards the traffic to the Kubernetes service that will handle the request. So instead of having MetalLB needed to hand out a bunch of IP addresses that you can point to for specific services, Traefik or Nginx proxy, etc, is the only IP you need and then it handles application routing. "

However as soon as i have time i will likely go the way of Hetzner LB, Microk8s with MetalLB and external(i mean standalone outside of the microk8s cluster) microceph storage cluster. I just wonder if microceph is LTS project or not..

Posts: 33

mscrocdile

Topic starter

Jan 30, 2024 8:22 am

(@mscrocdile)

Eminent Member

Joined: 11 months ago

Hello, I'm back with some progress I'd like to share and ask for something yet.

Finally I had only one option - to use

GITHUB.COM "https://github.com/hetznercloud/hcloud-cloud-controller-manager"

GitHub - hetznercloud/hcloud-cloud-controller-manager: Kubernetes cloud-controller-manager for Hetzner Cloud

Kubernetes cloud-controller-manager for Hetzner Cloud - hetznercloud/hcloud-cloud-controller-manager

but it worked fine. With the help of

BLOG.KAY.SH "https://blog.kay.sh/kubernetes-hetzner-cloud-loadbalancer-nginx-ingress-cert-manager/"

Kubernetes + Hetzner Cloud + Loadbalancer + Nginx Ingress + Cert-Manager

Setup a working Kubernetes cluster on the Hetzner cloud using their loadbalancer connected to a nginx ingress

i was able to successfully access test nginx site via https.

However I wanted to use traefik ingress controller. I've installed traefik using helm, annotated traefik service the same way so it has external ip.

So far, good. First i wanted to test just http at port 80 (no certificates yet). I've created deployment, service and IngressRoute. Everything seems ok and service is accessible from cluster. But i cannot access it from internet, i get http error 400. In Hetzner LB there are correct 80 and 443 ports open. Nothing in traefik log. In case i use Ingress instead of IngressRoute then i can see there is no address if i list "k get ingress".

No idea what to check. Traefik is in DEBUG.

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Brandon Lee

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(@brandon-lee)

Joined: 14 years ago

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Posts: 395

Jan 30, 2024 10:21 pm

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mscrocdile

@mscrocdile I'm not too familiar with Hetznercloud and what services they offer. So you can access your services internally, both on 80 and 443? It is just when you access from the Internet? Is there a firewall in between the Internet and the load balancer you mentioned? Do you have port forwarding in play?

Sorry for all the questions, just want to get a picture of how things are configured. Do you have a network diagram you can share?

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