every microservices diagram ever It’s not a microservices platform if there’s only one service. And all those services need to be able to talk to each other, they need to cope when some of them are not feeling well, they need to run on real machines, they need to be able to connect with the outside world and so much more besides. This is where Kubernetes comes in — it orchestrates the life and times of individual Docker containers, giving us the primitives we need to construct robust and scalable systems. These microservices things are kind of a big deal right now but there are few step by step guides to getting a basic system up and running. This is partly due to the fact that the notion of a is an oxymoron. We’ll try regardless. “basic microservice system” We do need some pre requisite knowledge, specifically what is and what it’s for. After that you’ll need to know the Kube fundamentals: , , et al. Docker Pods Services Deployments This guide is mainly aimed at people who have got a single service running in Kube and are thinking “ . now what?” Tldr; section If you are more of a ‘just show me the code’ sort of person, you’ll really like . Otherwise read on. this git repo Before we start All our microservices will be written in v8.x so you’ll want to go install that first. They’ll all be very simple so you won’t need more than the most cursory javascript / node knowledge. node.js We’re going to run all this on , it’s a neat way of getting Kube running locally. You can find installation instructions . After that you’ll want to verify that your Minikube installation is all good. Minikube here First create a Minikube cluster: $ minikube start Starting local Kubernetes v1.8.0 cluster...Starting VM...Getting VM IP address...Moving files into cluster...Setting up certs...Connecting to cluster...Setting up kubeconfig...Starting cluster components...Kubectl is now configured to use the cluster.Loading cached images from config file. Then check that the Kube system services are all happy: $ kubectl get services -n kube-system NAME                   CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)         AGEkube-dns               10.96.0.10      <none>        53/UDP,53/TCP   1mkubernetes-dashboard   10.107.19.167   <nodes>       80:30000/TCP    1m One more thing, we need Minikube to share our local docker registry, else it won’t be able to find the docker images that we build. $ eval $(minikube docker-env) Super. Now let’s build something fun. TOTAL INVOICE MANAGEMENT!!!1! Lets build a system that manages invoices for a company. Sounds simple enough and it’s also the most fun thing I could think of. Our system will comprise of: An to route traffic into our system API gateway An to limit access authentication service A front end to return information about invoices invoices service A back end that’ll tell us when an invoice is likely to be paid expected date service the basics The first step is getting our folder structure sorted. We’ll have one folder for all our kube config files, and others for each of our services. - total_invoice_managment|| - kube| - invoices_svc The invoices service Our first service is which is responsible for individual invoices. It’ll have a single endpoint which will swap an id for the invoice data. Lets quickly scaffold the service using the node package manager ( ). invoices_svc api/invoices/:id npm $ cd ./invoices_svc$ npm init# then say yes to everything$ npm install express Update to include the script to boot the app: package.json Add the file that contains the code for the service: index.js Verify that it runs locally: $ PORT=3007 npm start invoices_svc listening on 3007 $ curl localhost:3007/api/invoices/10 {"id":10,"ref":"INV-10","amount":1000,"balance":990,"ccy":"GBP"} It works! Satisfied that our service works as expected, we can now dockerize it by making a : Dockerfile Then we can build the Docker container to make sure all is well: $ docker build ./ -t invoices_svc:v1 Time to start on getting this service into Kube. Lets change directory to the folder a level up: kube $ cd ../kube And add our first bit of kube config. Call the file invoices_svc.yaml This config defines a Kube and it’s accompanying . We can ask kube to boot it up service deployment $ kubectl apply -f ./invoices_svc.yaml deployment "invoices-svc" createdservice "invoices-svc" created We should see its service: $ kubectl get services NAME           CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)   AGEinvoices-svc   10.104.86.220   <none>        80/TCP    3mkubernetes     10.96.0.1       <none>        443/TCP   1h And all the pods too: $ kubectl get pods NAME                            READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGEinvoices-svc-65b5f7bbd4-ckr8d   1/1       Running   0          44sinvoices-svc-65b5f7bbd4-gvk9s   1/1       Running   0          44sinvoices-svc-65b5f7bbd4-z2kx7   1/1       Running   0          44s As there’s no external IP for we’ll need to get into a container the cluster to be able to try it out. Spinning one up specially seems odd, but it’s a very kubey way of doing things. Busyboxplus is just a container that has a basic shell and some common tools. We need it to use . invoices_svc inside curl $ kubectl run curl --image=radial/busyboxplus:curl -i --tty [ root@curl-696777f579-qwjcr:/ ]$ curl 10.104.86.220/api/invoices/1 {"id":1,"ref":"INV-1","amount":100,"balance":90,"ccy":"GBP"} (To escape the container you need to press ctl-d) It works! Sort of. It’s pretty useless being stuck inside our cluster - we need to create an so that traffic can find it’s way in. We are going to use for this. It’s a handy wrapper around and has lots of great API gateway features built in. Routing seems like a good place to start. ingress Ambassador Envoy Proxy We’ll need to get Ambassador running on our cluster. Create a file called in the folder: ambassador.yaml kube And then we can boot it up: $ kubectl apply -f ./ambassador.yaml $ kubectl get servicesNAME               CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)          AGEambassador         10.103.215.136   <pending>     80:32005/TCP     11sambassador-admin   10.104.3.82      <nodes>       8877:31385/TCP   11sinvoices-svc       10.104.86.220    <none>        80/TCP           45mkubernetes         10.96.0.1        <none>        443/TCP          2h We need to tell ambassador about our though, and we do so by adding some annotations to the section of invoices_svc Service invoices_svc.yaml The key routes traffic from to our service. To keep things nice and tidy the key does a bit of transforming too so that traffic to gets routed to our service at prefix /invoices/ rewrite /invoices/:id /api/invoices/:id. Once the config has been added, we can apply it: $ kubectl apply -f ./invoices_svc.yaml Ambassador keeps watch over everything that happens in the cluster. When we updated the config, ambassador detected that change and went looking for any annotations. It found them, and will now route traffic to the service. In theory, we now have a working external api gateway to our cluster. Before we can validate that hypothesis we need to create a tunnel from our localhost to the minikube cluster: $ minikube service ambassador --url http://192.168.99.100:32005 This particular url is only for my local machine — . you need to use your own for future steps We can use the returned url to reach our cluster: $ curl http://192.168.99.100:32005/invoices/42 {"id":42,"ref":"INV-42","amount":4200,"balance":4190,"ccy":"GBP"} 🎉 It works! So we have a service and a gateway. Adding authentication It’s not great having our service available to world + dog. We should add some kind of authentication to our gateway. Nobody will be surprised to hear that we’ll want a new service for that, or that it’ll be called . auth_svc Create a new folder called auth_svc Copy the from Dockerfile invoices_svc Repeat the npm steps that we did for invoices_svc $ cd ../$ mkdir $ cd ./ $ npm init$ npm install express$ cp ../invoices_svc/Dockerfile . auth_svc auth_svc # don't forget to add "start": "node index.js" to your package.json! Create the app: auth_svc Create the kube config: Build the docker image: $ docker build -t auth_svc:v1 ./auth_svc/ Apply the kube config: $  kubectl apply -f ./kube/auth_svc.yaml see if it worked: $ curl http://192.168.99.100:32005/invoices/42 {"ok":false} Aces, we are now locked out, unless we know the magic word: $  curl -H 'authorization: letmeinpleasekthxbye' http://192.168.99.100:32005/invoices/42 {"id":42,"ref":"INV-42","amount":4200,"balance":4190,"ccy":"GBP"} Let’s take stock. We have an API gateway that authenticates traffic and routes it to our service. However we don’t want of our services to be public, what about back end services that our front end services call? Well, Kube has a way of doing that too. all When do I get paid? It’s always nice to know when your customers will pay you. We will create an that’ll tell us when an invoice is expected to be paid. It’s a similar jig to the last two services: extreme high sophistication algorithmic inference engine* $ cd ../$ mkdir expected_date_svc$ cd ./expected_date_svc$ npm init$ npm install express$ npm install moment$ cp ../invoices_svc/Dockerfile . # don't forget to add "start": "node index.js" to your package.json! And the code is_:_ extreme high sophistication algorithmic inference engine That just leaves the kube config: You know the drill: $ docker build -t expected_date_svc:v1 .$ kubectl apply -f ../kube/expected_date_svc.yaml$ kubectl get services NAME                CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)          AGEambassador          10.103.215.136   <pending>     80:32005/TCP     19hambassador-admin    10.104.3.82      <nodes>       8877:31385/TCP   19hauth-svc            10.108.119.134   <none>        3000/TCP         18hexpected-date-svc   10.101.227.50    <none>        80/TCP           1minvoices-svc        10.104.86.220    <none>        80/TCP           20hkubernetes          10.96.0.1        <none>        443/TCP          21h So now we have the running, we’ll want to modify the to make us of it. expected_date_svc invoices_svc There’s a new dependency we need to make a http request: $ cd ../invoices_svc$ npm install request-promise$ npm install request Then we make a request to the and add the result to our invoice object. Here’s the updated : expected_date_svc invoice_svc We need to rebuild the docker image: $ docker build -t invoices_svc:v2 . And we also need to update the kube config for the invoices_svc First up, it needs to reference the new docker image: We also need to add an environment variable that contains the url to the . This is the nifty bit. Kubernetes uses internal DNS routing — you can read more about that . The short version is that kube creates a special url for every named service. Its format is , so the can be found at . Lets go set that environment variable by updating the config: expected_svc here SVCNAME.NAMESPACE.svc.cluster.local expected_date_svc expected-date-svc.default.svc.cluster.local Now that the config is all updated, we apply it to the cluster: $ kubectl apply -f ../kube/invoices_svc.yaml And check that the expected date is being added: $ curl -H 'authorization: letmeinpleasekthxbye' http://192.168.99.100:32005/invoices/42 {"id":42,"ref":"INV-42","amount":4200,"balance":4190,"ccy":"GBP","expectedDate":"2018-01-01T11:54:30.769Z"} This should be enough for the reader to get a cluster running. Next steps include adding and removing replicas to scale services, adding a so that kubernetes knows if a service fails silently or logging and monitoring so we can find out what our services are up to when we aren’t looking. liveness probe How all the bits go togther I like it! Great, us too. We like kube so much that we use it for our most demanding infrastructure requirements at , in particular for our data science models. It’s a steep learning curve, but the rewards are substantial. Fluidly If you like the sound of this sort of work we are often looking for amazing people. Drop us a line: . jobs@fluidly.com * our data scientists do this for real!

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