Automatic DNS for Kubernetes Ingresses with ExternalDNS

2017-05-01

ExternalDNS is a relatively new Kubernetes Incubator project that makes Ingresses and Services available via DNS. It currently supports AWS Route 53 and Google Cloud DNS. There are several similar tools available with varying features and capabilities like route53-kubernetes, Mate, and the DNS controller from Kops. While it is not there yet, the goal is for ExternalDNS to include all of the functionality of the other options by 1.0. In this post, we will use ExternalDNS to automatically create DNS records for Ingress resources on AWS.…

Deploy Kubernetes in an Existing AWS VPC with Kops and Terraform

2017-03-05

Kops is a relatively new tool that can be used to deploy production-ready Kubernetes clusters on AWS. It has the ability to create a highly-available cluster spanning multiple availability zones and supports a private networking topology. By default, Kops will create all of the required resources on AWS for you — the EC2 instances, the VPC and subnets, the required DNS entries in Route53, the load balancers for exposing the Kubernetes API, and all of the other necessary infrastructure components. For organizations that use Terraform, Kops can instead be used to generate a Terraform configuration for all of the aforementioned AWS resources. This will allow them to use the familiar terraform plan and terraform apply workflow to build and update their Kubernetes infrastructure. The Terraform configuration that Kops generates will include new VPC, subnet, and route resources. But what if you want to use Kops to generate a Terraform configuration for a Kubernetes cluster in an existing VPC? In this post, I will walk through the process to achieve this. …

Terraform State Move - Refactoring Terraform Against Existing Infrastructure

2017-02-20

Have you ever wanted to refactor a Terraform configuration against an already existing infrastructure? In the past, modifying the Terraform state required manually editing a potentially large and confusing JSON file. Recent versions of Terraform make it possible to manipulate a Terraform state file using supported CLI commands. With this new capability, it is significantly easier to refactor an existing Terraform configuration into modules without affecting the underlying infrastructure in any way. If you are importing existing cloud infrastructure into Terraform, you will also likely be using the terraform state * commands to build a modular configuration. …

Using Docker Native Health Checks

2016-10-30

In version 1.12, Docker added the ability to perform health checks directly in the Docker engine — without needing external monitoring tools or sidecar containers. Built so that the new Swarm mode orchestration layer can reschedule unhealthy containers or remove them from the load balancer pool, health checks can also be used outside of Swarm mode. …

Using Google Container Registry (GCR) with Minikube

2016-09-14

Are you using the Google Container Registry (GCR) and seeing the dreaded ImagePullBackoff status on your pods in minikube? Are you seeing errors in your pod events like this? …

Rolling updates with Kubernetes: Replication Controllers vs Deployments

2016-06-20

A rolling update is the process of updating an application — whether it is a new version or just updated configuration — in a serial fashion. By updating one instance at a time, you are able to keep the application up and running. If you were to just update all instances at the same time, your application would likely experience downtime. In addition, performing a rolling update allows you to catch errors during the process so that you can rollback before it affects all of your users.…

Building a Kubernetes Cluster on AWS

2016-03-13

The excellent Kubernetes documentation includes a guide that covers how to build and run a Kubernetes cluster on AWS with the kube-up script. However, when it comes to customizing that install, the details are a little sparse. In this post, I am going to go over just one way you can customize the cluster. Hopefully, this will provide a little more transparency about what is going on under the hood and give you a little more control over how your cluster is built.…

Kong on Mantl

2016-02-24

Kong is an “Open-source, Microservice & API Management Layer built on top of NGINX”. Mantl is a “modern, batteries included platform for rapidly deploying globally distributed services”. I put together a short video on running Kong on Mantl. Are you interested in learning more about mantl, mesos, marathon, kubernetes, swarm, nomad, and more? Sign up below!

Introducing AWS Keymaster

2015-10-18

AWS Keymaster is a simple utility that allows you to import your own personal key pair into all AWS regions with a single command. Distributed as a single binary with no dependencies, AWS Keymaster is easy to deploy and run. It is also available as a Docker image. …

Waiting on EC2 Resources

2015-10-11

When using the AWS CLI, did you know you could run a command that waits for a specific resource or condition to occur before moving on to the next? For example, you might want to write a script that starts an EC2 instance and then, only after it is up and running, perform an additional task. Without the aws ec2 wait command, this could be a bit of a challenge involving a loop and some polling for the state. However, this is actually kind of trivial with the wait command at our disposal. …