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VMware Cloud on AWS Deep Dive – Activating, Deploying and Using the managed Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service

VMware, Kubernetes, , , , , ,

In this blog post I’m going to deep dive into the end-to-end activation, deployment, and consuming of the managed Tanzu Services (Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service > TKGS) within a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC. I’ll deploy a Tanzu Cluster inside a vSphere Namespace, and then deploy my trusty Pac-Man application and make it Publicly Accessible.

Previously to this capability, you would need to deploy Tanzu Kubernetes Grid to VMC, which was fully supported, as a Management Cluster and then additional Tanzu Clusters for your workloads. (See Terminology explanations here). This was a fully support option, however it did not provide you all the integrated features you could have by using the TKGS as part of your On-Premises vSphere environment.

What is Tanzu Services on VMC?

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service is a managed service built into the VMware Cloud on AWS vSphere environment.

This feature brings the availability of the integrated Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service inside of vSphere itself, by coupling the platform together, you can easily deploy new Tanzu clusters, use the administration and authentication of vCenter, as well as provide governance and policies from vCenter as well.

Note: VMware Cloud on AWS does not enable activation of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid by default. Contact your account team for more information. 

Note2: In VMware Cloud on AWS, the Tanzu workload control plane can be activated only through the VMC Console.
But wait, couldn’t I already install a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Cluster onto VMC anyway?

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is a multi-cloud solution that deploys and manages Kubernetes clusters on your selected cloud provider. Previously to the vSphere integrated Tanzu offering for VMC that we are discussing today, you would deploy the general TKG option to your SDDC vCenter.

What differences should I know about this Tanzu Services offering in VMC versus the other Tanzu Kubernetes offering?
  • When Activated, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid for VMware Cloud on AWS is pre-provisioned with a VMC-specific content library that you cannot modify.
  • Tanzu Kubernetes Grid for VMware Cloud on AWS does not support vSphere Pods.
  • Creation of Tanzu Supervisor Namespace templates is not supported by VMware Cloud on AWS.
  • vSphere namespaces for Kubernetes releases are configured automatically during Tanzu Kubernetes Grid activation.
Activating Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service in a VMC SDDC
Reminder: Tanzu Services Activation capabilities are not activated by default. Contact your account team for more information.

Within your VMC Console, you can either go via the Launchpad method or via the SDDC inventory item. I’ll cover both:

  • Click on Launchpad
  • Open the Kubernetes Tab
  • Click Learn More

VMC - Launchpad - Kubernetes

  • Select the Journey Tab
  • Under Stage 2 – Activate > Click Get Started

VMC - Launchpad - Kubernetes - Journey - Get started

Alternatively, from the SDDC object in the Inventory view

  • Click Actions
  • Click “Activate Tanzu Kubernetes Grid”

VMC - Inventory - SDDC - Activate Tanzu Kubernetes Grid

You will now be shown a status dialog, as VMC checks to ensure that Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service can be activated in your cluster.

This will check you have the correct configurations and compute resources available.

VMC - Inventory - SDDC - Activate Tanzu Kubernetes Grid - Checking cluster resources

If the check is successful, you will now be presented the configuration wizard. Essentially, all you must provide is your configuration for four networks. Continue reading VMware Cloud on AWS Deep Dive – Activating, Deploying and Using the managed Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service →

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Openshift-install CLI Tool – Crash – Unable to decode instructions – Apple MacBook M1

Kubernetes, ,
The Issue

When running the OpenShift-Install CLI tool on my Apple MacBook M1 to create an OpenShift Cluster I kept hitting the same error:

assertion failed [inst.has.value()]: failed to decode instruction: 0x0

Openshift-install CLI Tool - Crash - Unable to decode instructions - Apple MacBook M1

The Cause

This is believed to be an issue created with the use of Rosetta 2 and Golang, and is somewhat documented on this GitHub issue by Apple Engineering.

The OpenShift-Install CLI Tool uses Terraform which relies on GoLang.

The Fix

In the above GitHub issue, it is found that running the below command either locally, or keeping it in your ~/.zshrc file will resolve the issue as a workaround.

export GODEBUG=asyncpreemptoff=1

Thank you to Andrew Sullivan from Red Hat, who pointed me to this blog post to help me find the answer!

Regards

Dean Lewis

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EKS – Kubectl – Unable to connect to the server – Exec plugin is configured to use API version client.authentication.k8s.io/v1alpha1

Kubernetes, , ,
The Issue

After moving my life over to a new Macbook and installing the latest AWS CLI tools including “aws-iam-authenticator” tool, I couldn’t run commands against my EKS Clusters. I kept hitting the following issue;

> kubectl get pods

Unable to connect to the server: getting credentials: exec plugin is configured to use API version client.authentication.k8s.io/v1alpha1, plugin returned version client.authentication.k8s.io/v1beta1
eks - aws-iam-authenticator - unable to connect to cluster
The Cause

AWS updated the aws-iam-authenicator component in version 0.5.4 to require v1beta1 your kubeconfig file for the cluster context. You will be using v1alpha1 more than likely, which generates this error.

The Fix

Update your kubeconfig file as necessary, replacing “v1alpha1” for “v1beta1” for any contexts for EKS clusters.

vi ~/.kube/config

# Alernatively you could run something like the below to automate the changes. This will also create a "config.bak" file of the orignal file before the changes

sed -i .bak -e 's/v1alpha1/v1beta1/' ~/.kube/config

eks - aws-iam-authenticator - v1alpha1 - v1beta1 - kubeconfig file

Below you can see I used the “sed” command, checked my file using “vi” then run the kubectl command successfully.

eks - aws-iam-authenticator - sed -i .bak -e 's:v1alpha1:v1beta1:' ~:.kube:config

Official GitHub Page

 

Regards

Dean Lewis

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Tanzu Service Mesh – Monitor Service Level Objectives and Configure Service Autoscaling

VMware, Kubernetes, , , ,

Continuing from the First Look blog post, where we created a distributed application between different public cloud Kubernetes deployments and connected them via Tanzu Service Mesh. We will move onto some of the more advanced capabilities of Tanzu Service Mesh.

In this blog post, we’ll look at how we can setup monitoring of our application components and performance against a Service Level Objective, and then how Tanzu Mission Control and action against violations of the SLO using auto-scaling capabilities.

What is a Service Level Objective and how do we monitor our app?

Service level objectives (SLO/s) provide a structured way to describe, measure, and monitor the performance, quality, and reliability of micro-service apps.

A SLO is used to describe the high-level objective for acceptable operation and health of one or more services over a length of time (for example, a week or a month).

  • For example, Service X should be healthy 99.1% of the time.

In the provided example, Service X can be “unhealthy” 1% of the time, which is considered an “Error Budget”. This allows for downtime for errors that are acceptable (keeping an app up 100% of the time is hard and expensive to achieve), or for the likes of planned routine maintenance.

The key is the specification of which metrics or characteristics, and associated thresholds are used to define the health of the micro-service/application.

  • For example:
    • Error rate is less than 2%
    • CPU Average is Less than 80%

This specification makes up the Service Level Indicator (SLI/s), of which one or multiple can be used to define an overall SLO.

Tanzu Service Mesh SLOs options

Before we configure, let’s quickly discuss what is available to be configured.

Tanzu Service Mesh (TSM) offers two SLO configurations:

  • Monitored SLOs
    • These provide alerting/indicators on performance of your services and if they meet your target SLO conditions based on the configured SLIs for each specified service.
    • This kind of SLO can be configured for Services that are part of a Global Namespace (GNS-scoped SLOs) or services that are part of a direct cluster (org-scoped SLOs).
  • Actionable SLOs
    • These extend the capabilities of Monitored SLOs by providing capabilities such as auto-scaling for services based on the SLIs.
    • This kind of SLO can only be configured for services inside a Global Namespace (GNS-scoped SLO).

    • Each actionable SLO can have only have one service, and a service can only have one actionable SLO.

The official documentation also takes you through some use-cases for SLOs. Alternatively, you can continue to follow this blog post for an example.

Quick overview of the demo environment
  • Tanzu Service Mesh (of course)
    • Global Namespace configured for default namespace in clusters with domain “app.sample.com”
  • Three Kubernetes Clusters with a scaled-out application deployed
    • AWS EKS Cluster
      • Running web front end (shopping) and cart instances
    • Azure AKS Cluster
      • Running Catalog Service that holds all the images for the Web front end
    • GCP GKE
      • Running full copy of the application

In this environment, I’m going to configure a SLO which is focused on the Front-End Service – Shopping, and will scale up the number of pods when the SLIs are breached.

Configure a SLO Policy and Autoscaler
  • Under the Policies header, expand
  • Select “SLOs”
  • Select either New Policy options

Continue reading Tanzu Service Mesh – Monitor Service Level Objectives and Configure Service Autoscaling →

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GKE – User cannot create resource – requires one of [“container.roles.create”] permission(s)

Kubernetes, , , , ,
The Issue

I stood up my first ever GKE cluster! Woo, go me!

However when I was trying to setup Tanzu Service Mesh, I hit issues such as:

Error from server (Forbidden): error when creating "operator-deployment.yaml": roles.rbac.authorization.k8s.io is forbidden: User "[email protected]" cannot create resource "roles" in API group "rbac.authorization.k8s.io" in the namespace "vmware-system-tsm": requires one of ["container.roles.create"] permission(s).
The Cause

This is because your initial Kubernetes login has no cluster level permissions, due to the RBAC setup.

The Fix

You need to create some new Cluster Level roles and bind to them with your account, or use the existing ones.

As this is a demo environment. I just bound my account to the out-of-the-box cluster-admin ClusterLevelRole (that is a mouthful!).

kubectl create clusterrolebinding cluster-admin-binding \
--clusterrole=cluster-admin \
--user=[gcp user email]

# Example
kubectl create clusterrolebinding cluster-admin-binding \
--clusterrole=cluster-admin \
[email protected]

If you need to double check with google account you are using, you can run:

gcloud info | grep Account

Regards

Dean Lewis