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Service Discovery From Within the Kubernetes Cluster

It is probably not common to write your own code to perform service discovery from within the Kubernetes cluster. It is better to delegate that responsibility to an ingress controller or a load balancer. However, ever the adventurer, I stumbled onto the Java Kubernetes Client.

The project was an investigation into using Spinnaker as a CI/CD tool for a new micro-services architecture. My adventures of getting Spinnaker to run on Minikube have been documented as a three-article series on DZone and can be accessed from my profile page. 

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Ubuntu Multipass as Kubernetes Host on Windows

Getting a Windows node to join a bare-bone Kubernetes cluster can be a daunting experience. In this posting I will demonstrate an easy way to achieve this using 1) a secondary network adaptor and 2) Ubuntu Multipass to create the required virtual machine on Windows.

This posting requires a working knowledge of Kubernetes, especially how to prepare and join a worker node to the cluster. A practice project to spin up a Kubernetes cluster with Ingress and MetalLB load-balancing using Ansible inspired the write-up and parts of that solution will be used. As such knowledge of Ansible might be beneficial but is not required.

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Spinnaker Meets Minikube: Part 3

In the previous posting, we build a Spinnaker pipeline to pull images from Dockerhub to deploy to a Minikube cluster. In this article, we will build a pipeline that deploys to a second staging environment after waiting for the go-ahead from an approval step. Kustomize will, furthermore, be used to illustrate how Spinnaker utilizes its built-in kubectl command to manage configurations from one environment to the next. 

Requirements

The hard yards have been done and it is time for play. Only Kustomize will be added to the soup. Do not despair should you not be familiar with it. This write-up serves as an excellent introduction to Kustomize.

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Spinnaker Meets Minikube: Part 2

Introduction

In the previous article, we installed Spinnaker on a Minikube cluster running on Windows 10. In this article, we will add GitHub as a data provider for a Spinnaker pipeline to continuously deploy a dockerized Spring Boot microservice onto the Minikube cluster. The pipeline will be triggered using a Cron job and can be templated so that all one's micro-services are automatically deployed to have a fully up-to-date local development environment at all times. 

Requirements

An understanding of Spring Boot, Github, and Docker Hub is presumed. However, fall-back instructions will be given for those that want to follow a lighter track that pulls the Docker image from the author's registry. However, certain things like proper artifact binding might not work as expected should the full guide not be followed.

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Spinnaker Meets Minikube: Part 1

Spinnaker is a continuous integration/continuous delivery tool that was started by Netflix in its quest for more agility. This posting will show how to get hands-on experience running Spinnaker on Windows 10.

Minikube provides the ability to run a Kubernetes cluster on local Linux, Mac, or Windows. It can therefore serve as a sandbox environment for Spinnaker training, experimentation or even to keep ones local development environment up to date with all the latest commits.