This guide walks through an example of building a simple memcached-operator powered by Ansible using tools and libraries provided by the Operator SDK.
- git
- docker version 17.03+.
- kubectl version v1.9.0+.
- ansible version v2.6.0+
- ansible-runner version v1.1.0+
- ansible-runner-http version v1.0.0+
- dep version v0.5.0+. (Optional if you aren't installing from source)
- go version v1.10+. (Optional if you aren't installing from source)
- Access to a kubernetes v.1.9.0+ cluster.
Note: This guide uses minikube version v0.25.0+ as the local kubernetes cluster and quay.io for the public registry.
The Operator SDK has a CLI tool that helps the developer to create, build, and deploy a new operator project.
Checkout the desired release tag and install the SDK CLI tool:
$ mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/operator-framework
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/operator-framework
$ git clone https://github.com/operator-framework/operator-sdk
$ cd operator-sdk
$ git checkout master
$ make dep
$ make install
This installs the CLI binary operator-sdk
at $GOPATH/bin
.
Use the CLI to create a new Ansible-based memcached-operator project:
$ operator-sdk new memcached-operator --api-version=cache.example.com/v1alpha1 --kind=Memcached --type=ansible
$ cd memcached-operator
This creates the memcached-operator project specifically for watching the
Memcached resource with APIVersion cache.example.com/v1apha1
and Kind
Memcached
.
To learn more about the project directory structure, see project layout doc.
A namespace-scoped operator (the default) watches and manages resources in a single namespace, whereas a cluster-scoped operator watches and manages resources cluster-wide. Namespace-scoped operators are preferred because of their flexibility. They enable decoupled upgrades, namespace isolation for failures and monitoring, and differing API definitions. However, there are use cases where a cluster-scoped operator may make sense. For example, the cert-manager operator is often deployed with cluster-scoped permissions and watches so that it can manage issuing certificates for an entire cluster.
If you'd like to create your memcached-operator project to be cluster-scoped use the following operator-sdk new
command instead:
$ operator-sdk new memcached-operator --cluster-scoped --api-version=cache.example.com/v1alpha1 --kind=Memcached --type=ansible
For this example the memcached-operator will execute the following
reconciliation logic for each Memcached
Custom Resource (CR):
- Create a memcached Deployment if it doesn't exist
- Ensure that the Deployment size is the same as specified by the
Memcached
CR
By default, the memcached-operator watches Memcached
resource events as shown
in watches.yaml
and executes Ansible Role Memached
:
---
- version: v1alpha1
group: cache.example.com
kind: Memcached
Role
Specifying a role
option in watches.yaml
will configure the operator to use
this specified path when launching ansible-runner
with an Ansible Role. By
default, the new
command will fill in an absolute path to where your role
should go.
---
- version: v1alpha1
group: cache.example.com
kind: Memcached
role: /opt/ansible/roles/Memcached
Playbook
Specifying a playbook
option in watches.yaml
will configure the operator to
use this specified path when launching ansible-runner
with an Ansible
Playbook
---
- version: v1alpha1
group: cache.example.com
kind: Memcached
playbook: /opt/ansible/playbook.yaml
The first thing to do is to modify the generated Ansible role under
roles/Memcached
. This Ansible Role controls the logic that is executed when a
resource is modified.
Defining the spec for an Ansible Operator can be done entirely in Ansible. The
Ansible Operator will simply pass all key value pairs listed in the Custom
Resource spec field along to Ansible as
variables.
The names of all variables in the spec field are converted to snake_case
by the operator before running ansible. For example, serviceAccount
in
the spec becomes service_account
in ansible.
It is recommended that you perform some type validation in Ansible on the
variables to ensure that your application is receiving expected input.
First, set a default in case the user doesn't set the spec
field by modifying
roles/Memcached/defaults/main.yml
:
size: 1
Now that we have the spec defined, we can define what Ansible is actually
executed on resource changes. Since this is an Ansible Role, the default
behavior will be to execute the tasks in roles/Memcached/tasks/main.yml
. We
want Ansible to create a deployment if it does not exist which runs the
memcached:1.4.36-alpine
image. Ansible 2.5+ supports the k8s Ansible
Module which we
will leverage to control the deployment definition.
Modify roles/Memcached/tasks/main.yml
to look like the following:
---
- name: start memcached
k8s:
definition:
kind: Deployment
apiVersion: apps/v1
metadata:
name: '{{ meta.name }}-memcached'
namespace: '{{ meta.namespace }}'
spec:
replicas: "{{size}}"
selector:
matchLabels:
app: memcached
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: memcached
spec:
containers:
- name: memcached
command:
- memcached
- -m=64
- -o
- modern
- -v
image: "docker.io/memcached:1.4.36-alpine"
ports:
- containerPort: 11211
It is important to note that we used the size
variable to control how many
replicas of the Memcached deployment we want. We set the default to 1
, but
any user can create a Custom Resource that overwrites the default.
Before running the operator, Kubernetes needs to know about the new custom resource definition the operator will be watching.
Deploy the CRD:
$ kubectl create -f deploy/crds/cache_v1alpha1_memcached_crd.yaml
Once this is done, there are two ways to run the operator:
- As a pod inside a Kubernetes cluster
- As a go program outside the cluster using
operator-sdk
Running as a pod inside a Kubernetes cluster is preferred for production use.
Build the memcached-operator image and push it to a registry:
$ operator-sdk build quay.io/example/memcached-operator:v0.0.1
$ docker push quay.io/example/memcached-operator:v0.0.1
Kubernetes deployment manifests are generated in deploy/operator.yaml
. The
deployment image in this file needs to be modified from the placeholder
REPLACE_IMAGE
to the previous built image. To do this run:
$ sed -i 's|REPLACE_IMAGE|quay.io/example/memcached-operator:v0.0.1|g' deploy/operator.yaml
If you created your operator using --cluster-scoped=true
, update the service account namespace in the generated ClusterRoleBinding
to match where you are deploying your operator.
$ export OPERATOR_NAMESPACE=$(kubectl config view --minify -o jsonpath='{.contexts[0].context.namespace}')
$ sed -i "s|REPLACE_NAMESPACE|$OPERATOR_NAMESPACE|g" deploy/role_binding.yaml
Note
If you are performing these steps on OSX, use the following commands instead:
$ sed -i "" 's|REPLACE_IMAGE|quay.io/example/memcached-operator:v0.0.1|g' deploy/operator.yaml
$ sed -i "" "s|REPLACE_NAMESPACE|$OPERATOR_NAMESPACE|g" deploy/role_binding.yaml
Deploy the memcached-operator:
$ kubectl create -f deploy/service_account.yaml
$ kubectl create -f deploy/role.yaml
$ kubectl create -f deploy/role_binding.yaml
$ kubectl create -f deploy/operator.yaml
Verify that the memcached-operator is up and running:
$ kubectl get deployment
NAME DESIRED CURRENT UP-TO-DATE AVAILABLE AGE
memcached-operator 1 1 1 1 1m
This method is preferred during the development cycle to speed up deployment and testing.
Note: Ensure that Ansible Runner and Ansible Runner HTTP Plugin is installed or else you will see unexpected errors from Ansible Runner when a Custom Resource is created.
It is also important that the role
path referenced in watches.yaml
exists
on your machine. Since we are normally used to using a container where the Role
is put on disk for us, we need to manually copy our role to the configured
Ansible Roles path (e.g /etc/ansible/roles
.
Run the operator locally with the default kubernetes config file present at
$HOME/.kube/config
:
$ operator-sdk up local
INFO[0000] Go Version: go1.10
INFO[0000] Go OS/Arch: darwin/amd64
INFO[0000] operator-sdk Version: 0.0.5+git
Run the operator locally with a provided kubernetes config file:
$ operator-sdk up local --kubeconfig=config
INFO[0000] Go Version: go1.10
INFO[0000] Go OS/Arch: darwin/amd64
INFO[0000] operator-sdk Version: 0.0.5+git
Modify deploy/cr.yaml
as shown and create a Memcached
custom resource:
$ cat deploy/cr.yaml
apiVersion: "cache.example.com/v1alpha1"
kind: "Memcached"
metadata:
name: "example-memcached"
spec:
size: 3
$ kubectl apply -f deploy/crds/cache_v1alpha1_memcached_cr.yaml
Ensure that the memcached-operator creates the deployment for the CR:
$ kubectl get deployment
NAME DESIRED CURRENT UP-TO-DATE AVAILABLE AGE
memcached-operator 1 1 1 1 2m
example-memcached 3 3 3 3 1m
Check the pods to confirm 3 replicas were created:
$ kubectl get pods
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
example-memcached-6fd7c98d8-7dqdr 1/1 Running 0 1m
example-memcached-6fd7c98d8-g5k7v 1/1 Running 0 1m
example-memcached-6fd7c98d8-m7vn7 1/1 Running 0 1m
memcached-operator-7cc7cfdf86-vvjqk 1/1 Running 0 2m
Change the spec.size
field in the memcached CR from 3 to 4 and apply the
change:
$ cat deploy/cr.yaml
apiVersion: "cache.example.com/v1alpha1"
kind: "Memcached"
metadata:
name: "example-memcached"
spec:
size: 4
$ kubectl apply -f deploy/crds/cache_v1alpha1_memcached_cr.yaml
Confirm that the operator changes the deployment size:
$ kubectl get deployment
NAME DESIRED CURRENT UP-TO-DATE AVAILABLE AGE
example-memcached 4 4 4 4 5m
Clean up the resources:
$ kubectl delete -f deploy/crds/cache_v1alpha1_memcached_cr.yaml
$ kubectl delete -f deploy/operator.yaml
$ kubectl delete -f deploy/role_binding.yaml
$ kubectl delete -f deploy/role.yaml
$ kubectl delete -f deploy/service_account.yaml
$ kubectl delete -f deploy/crds/cache_v1alpha1_memcached_cr.yaml