kubeadm-dind-cluster

A Kubernetes multi-node cluster for developer of Kubernetes and projects that extend Kubernetes. Based on kubeadm and DIND (Docker in Docker).

Supports both local workflows and workflows utilizing powerful remote machines/cloud instances for building Kubernetes, starting test clusters and running e2e tests.

If you're an application developer, you may be better off with Minikube because it's more mature and less dependent on the local environment, but if you're feeling adventurous you may give kubeadm-dind-cluster a try, too. In particular you can run kubeadm-dind-cluster in CI environment such as Travis without having issues with nested virtualization.

Requirements

Docker 1.12+ is recommended. If you're not using one of the preconfigured scripts (see below) and not building from source, it's better to have kubectl executable in your path matching the version of k8s binaries you're using (i.e. for example better don't use kubectl 1.10.x with hyperkube 1.9.x).

kubeadm-dind-cluster supports k8s versions 1.8.x, 1.9.x and 1.10.x.

As of now, running kubeadm-dind-cluster on Docker with btrfs storage driver is not supported.

The problems include inability to properly clean up DIND volumes due to a docker bug which is not really fixed and, more importantly, a kubelet problem. If you want to run kubeadm-dind-cluster on btrfs anyway, set RUN_ON_BTRFS_ANYWAY environment variable to a non-empty value.

By default kubeadm-dind-cluster uses dockerized builds, so no Go installation is necessary even if you're building Kubernetes from source. If you want you can overridde this behavior by setting KUBEADM_DIND_LOCAL to a non-empty value in config.sh.

Mac OS X considerations

Ensure to have md5sha1sum installed. If not existing can be installed via brew install md5sha1sum.

When building Kubernetes from source on Mac OS X, it should be possible to build kubectl locally, i.e. make WHAT=cmd/kubectl must work.

Using preconfigured scripts

kubeadm-dind-cluster currently provides preconfigured scripts for Kubernetes 1.8, 1.9 and 1.10. This may be convenient for use with projects that extend or use Kubernetes. For example, you can start Kubernetes 1.8 like this:

$ wget https://cdn.rawgit.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubeadm-dind-cluster/master/fixed/dind-cluster-v1.8.sh
$ chmod +x dind-cluster-v1.8.sh

$ # start the cluster
$ ./dind-cluster-v1.8.sh up

$ # add kubectl directory to PATH
$ export PATH="$HOME/.kubeadm-dind-cluster:$PATH"

$ kubectl get nodes
NAME                      STATUS    AGE       VERSION
kube-master   Ready     6m        v1.8.6
kube-node-1   Ready     5m        v1.8.6
kube-node-2   Ready     5m        v1.8.6

$ # k8s dashboard available at http://localhost:8080/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kubernetes-dashboard:/proxy

$ # restart the cluster, this should happen much quicker than initial startup
$ ./dind-cluster-v1.8.sh up

$ # stop the cluster
$ ./dind-cluster-v1.8.sh down

$ # remove DIND containers and volumes
$ ./dind-cluster-v1.8.sh clean

Replace 1.8 with 1.9 or 1.10 to use other Kubernetes versions. Important note: you need to do ./dind-cluster....sh clean when you switch between Kubernetes versions (but no need to do this between rebuilds if you use BUILD_HYPERKUBE=y like described below).

Using with Kubernetes source

$ git clone git@github.com:kubernetes-sigs/kubeadm-dind-cluster.git ~/dind

$ cd ~/work/kubernetes/src/k8s.io/kubernetes

$ export BUILD_KUBEADM=y
$ export BUILD_HYPERKUBE=y

$ # build binaries+images and start the cluster
$ ~/dind/dind-cluster.sh up

$ kubectl get nodes
NAME                      STATUS         AGE
kube-master   Ready,master   1m
kube-node-1   Ready          34s
kube-node-2   Ready          34s

$ # k8s dashboard available at http://localhost:8080/ui

$ # run conformance tests
$ ~/dind/dind-cluster.sh e2e

$ # restart the cluster rebuilding
$ ~/dind/dind-cluster.sh up

$ # run particular e2e test based on substring
$ ~/dind/dind-cluster.sh e2e "existing RC"

$ # shut down the cluster
$ ~/dind/dind-cluster.sh down

The first dind/dind-cluster.sh up invocation can be slow because it needs to build the base image and Kubernetes binaries. Subsequent invocations are much faster.

Kube-router

Instead of using kube-proxy and static routes (with bridge CNI plugin), kube-router can be used. Kube-router uses the bridge plugin, but uses IPVS kernel module, instead of iptables. This results in better performance and scalability. Kube-router also uses iBGP, so that static routes are not required for pods to communicate across nodes.

To use kube-router, set the CNI_PLUGIN environment variable to "kube-router".

IPv6 Mode

To run Kubernetes in IPv6 only mode, set the environment variable IP_MODE to "ipv6". There are additional customizations that you can make for IPv6, to set the prefix used for DNS64, subnet prefix to use for DinD, and the service subnet CIDR (among other settings - see dind-cluster.sh):

export EMBBEDDED_CONFIG=y
export DNS64_PREFIX=fd00:77:64:ff9b::
export DIND_SUBNET=fd00:77::
export SERVICE_CIDR=fd00:77:30::/110

NOTE: The DNS64 and NAT64 containers that are created on the host, persist beyond down operation. This is to reduce startup time, if doing multiple down/up cycles. When clean is done, these containers are removed.

NOTE: Multi-cluster mode has not been tested, as is not currently supported for IPv6 mode.

NOTE: If you use kube-router for networking, IPv6 is not supported, as of July 2018.

Configuration

You may edit config.sh to override default settings. See comments in the file for more info. In particular, you can specify CNI plugin to use via CNI_PLUGIN variable (bridge, ptp, flannel, calico, weave, kube-router).

Remote Docker / GCE

It's possible to build Kubernetes on a remote machine running Docker. kubeadm-dind-cluster can consume binaries directly from the build data container without copying them back to developer's machine. An example utilizing GCE instance is provided in gce-setup.sh. You may try running it using source (.) so that docker-machine shell environment is preserved, e.g.

. gce-setup.sh

The example is based on sample commands from build/README.md in Kubernetes source.

When using a remote machine, you need to use ssh port forwarding to forward KUBE_RSYNC_PORT and APISERVER_PORT.

If you do not explicitly set APISERVER_PORT, that port will be randomized. To help with that ./dind-cluster.sh will call a user-defined executable as soon as the port is allocated and the kubectl context is set up. For that to happen you need to set DIND_PORT_FORWARDER to a path to an executable, which will be called with the allocated port as a first argument. If you keep DIND_PORT_FORWARDER empty, that mechanism will not kick in.

Dumping cluster state

In case of CI environment such as Travis CI or Circle CI, it's often desirable to get detailed cluster state for a failed job. Moreover, in case of e.g. Travis CI there's no way to store the artefacts without using an external service such as Amazon S3. Because of this, kubeadm-dind-cluster supports dumping cluster state as a text block that can be later split into individual files. For cases where there are limits on the log size (e.g. 4 Mb log limit in Travis CI) it's also possible to dump the lzma-compressed text block using base64 encoding.

The following commands can be used to work with cluster state dumps:

• ./dind-cluster.sh dump dumps the cluster state as a text block
• ./dind-cluster.sh dump64 dumps the cluster state as a base64 blob
• ./dind-cluster.sh split-dump splits the text block into individual files using @@@ filename @@@ markers which are generated by dump. The output is stored in cluster-dump/ subdirectory of the current directory.
• ./dind-cluster.sh split-dump64 splits the base64 blob into separate files. The blob has start and end markers so it can be extracted automatically from a build job log. The output is stored in cluster-dump/ subdirectory of the current directory.

All of the above commands work with 'fixed' scripts, too. kubeadm-dind-cluster's own Travis CI jobs dump base64 blobs in case of failure. Such blocks can be then extracted directly from the output of travis command line utility, e.g.

travis logs NNN.N | ./dind-cluster.sh split-dump64

The following information is currently stored in the dump:

• status and logs for the following systemd units on each DIND node, if the exist: kubelet.service, dindnet.service, criproxy.service and dockershim.service (the latter two are used by CRI Proxy)
• ps auxww, docker ps -a, ip a and ip r output for each DIND node
• the logs of all the containers of each pod in the cluster
• the output of kubectl get all --all-namespaces -o wide, kubectl describe all --all-namespaces and kubectl get nodes -o wide

Running multiple clusters in parallel

dind-cluster.sh can be used to create and manage multiple dind clusters.

A cluster with DIND_LABEL not configured will use the default names for the docker resources and kubectl context, e.g. kube-master (container name), kubeadm-dind-kube-master (volume name), dind (context name), ...

For every additional cluster DIND_LABEL needs to be set to an unique value. By doing so, all resources will be suffixed with -<hash>, where <hash> is the sha1 hash of the value of DIND_LABEL. Certain docker resources will be labeled with the value of DIND_LABEL, see the example below.

In any case, 'default' or 'additional' cluster, the subnet for the docker network and the port for the APIServer will be randomly assigned. You can change that by explicitly setting DIND_SUBNET/DIND_SUBNET_SIZE or APISERVER_PORT.

Example usage:

$ # creates a 'default' cluster
$ ./dind-cluster up
$ # creates an additional cluster with the label 'example-custom-label'
$ DIND_LABEL="example-custom-label" ./dind-cluster.sh up

Example containers:

$ docker ps  --format '{{ .ID }} - {{ .Names }} -- {{ .Labels }}'                                                                                                                                           │
923d2ab5c783 - kube-node-2 -- mirantis.kubeadm_dind_cluster=1
c165e366499c - kube-node-1 -- mirantis.kubeadm_dind_cluster=1
6499c923d2ab - kube-master -- mirantis.kubeadm_dind_cluster=1
fd566cd6c41e - kube-node-2-d63d26399fd0d25b9edc9460af1841985d91bce8 -- mirantis.kubeadm_dind_cluster=1,example-custom-label=
baaca6df2300 - kube-node-1-d63d26399fd0d25b9edc9460af1841985d91bce8 -- example-custom-label=,mirantis.kubeadm_dind_cluster=1
b15b957a6554 - kube-master-d63d26399fd0d25b9edc9460af1841985d91bce8 -- example-custom-label=,mirantis.kubeadm_dind_cluster=1

Example kubectl access:

$ # to access the 'default' cluster
$ kubectl --context dind get all
$ # to access the additional cluster
$ kubectl --context dind-d63d26399fd0d25b9edc9460af1841985d91bce8 get all

Motivation

hack/local-up-cluster.sh is widely used for k8s development. It has a couple of serious issues though. First of all, it only supports single node clusters, which means that it's hard to use it to work on e.g. scheduler-related issues and e2e tests that require several nodes can't be run. Another problem is that it has little resemblance to real clusters.

There's also k8s vagrant provider, but it's quite slow. Besides, cluster/ directory in k8s source is now considered deprecated.

Another widely suggested solution for development clusters is minikube, but currently it's not very well suited for development of Kubernetes itself. Besides, it's currently only supports single node, too, unless used with additional DIND layer like nkube.

kubernetes-dind-cluster is very nice & useful but uses a custom method of cluster setup (same as 2nd problem with local-up-cluster).

There's also sometimes a need to use a powerful remote machine or a cloud instance to build and test Kubernetes. Having Docker as the only requirement for such machine would be nice. Builds and unit tests are already covered by jbeda's work on dockerized builds, but being able to quickly start remote test clusters and run e2e tests is also important.

kubeadm-dind-cluster uses kubeadm to create a cluster consisting of docker containers instead of VMs. That's somewhat of a compromise but allows one to (re)start clusters quickly which is quite important when making changes to k8s source.

Moreover, some projects that extend Kubernetes such as Virtlet need a way to start kubernetes cluster quickly in CI environment without involving nested virtulization. Current kubeadm-dind-cluster version provides means to do this without the need to build Kubernetes locally.

Additional notes

At the moment, all non-serial [Conformance] e2e tests pass for clusters created by kubeadm-dind-cluster. [Serial]...[Conformance] tests currently have some issues. You may still try running them though:

$ dind/dind-cluster.sh e2e-serial

Contributing to & Testing kubeadm-dind-cluster

Test setup

There are currently two CI systems in place which automatically test PRs to kubeadm-dind-cluster:

• CircleCI
• TravisCI

CircleCI, ./.circleci/config.yml

All new tests should run on CircleCI, thus need to be configured in ./.circleci/config.yml.

There are some tests completely implemented in ./.circleci/config.yml. There are also other tests which are implemented in a script in ./test/ and then CircleCI just calls that script. This makes it easier to run a CircleCI test case also locally, by just calling the script:

$ DIND_ALLOW_AAAA_USE='true' TEST_K8S_VER='v1.10' ./test/test-ipv6-only.sh

TravisCI, ./test.sh

There are some tests in ./test.sh, those will run on TravisCI. New tests should be added to CircleCI and not to ./test.sh / the TravisCI setup.

To run a specific test from ./test.sh use the following mechanism to discover and run a specific test:

# See all test cases:
$ grep 'function test-case-' ./test.sh
# run a specific test:
$ TEST_CASE=<test-name> ./test.sh

IPv6 tests

All of the IPv6 related tests currently run on CircleCI. Those tests run with the machine executor (and not as docker containers), so that we have IPv6 available for the test cases. Note, that while internal IPv6 is configured, external IPv6 is not available.

There are two slightly different kind of tests which run for all version starting from v1.9:

TEST_K8S_VER='1.x' ./test/test-ipv6-only.sh

The cluster is setup with IPv6 support. The tests check if the IP resolution on nodes and pods works as expected. DNS64 is always used, and external IPv6 traffic goes throught NAT64. Both NAT64 and DNS64 are automatically deployed as docker containers, alongside the kube-master and kube-node-X containers running in the outer docker daemon.

These IPv6 tests do not depend on the host machine of the outer docker daemon actually having external IPv6 connectivity.

The tests cover, on pods, nodes and host:

• IP address lookups
• internal ping6s (pod to pod on different nodes)
• external ping6s (to IPv4-only and IPv6-enabled targets)

TEST_K8S_VER='1.x' DIND_ALLOW_AAAA_USE=true ./test/test-ipv6-only.sh

Those tests use the public AAAA records when available. Specifically for hosts which have a AAAA record, the IP address is used, traffic to those hosts does not get routed through NAT64. In that case the host running the outer docker daemon would need to have external IPv6 available to actually communicate with external IPv6 hosts. Therefore (because none of our CI systems can provide external IPv6) we skip the external ping tests and instead print a warning about external IPv6 not being available. If a host does not have a public AAAA record, the IPv4 address is used, embedded into a synthesized IPv6 address, and routed through NAT64.

In summary: The same test suites as above run, except for external ping tests which are intentionally disabled. Internal ping tests still run.

Related work

• kubeadm-dind-cluster was initially derived from kubernetes-dind-cluster, although as of now the code was completely rewritten. kubernetes-dind-cluster is somewhat faster but uses less standard way of k8s deployment. It also doesn't include support for consuming binaries from remote dockerized builds.
• kubeadm-ci-dind, kubeadm-ci-packager and kubeadm-ci-tester. These projects are similar to kubeadm-dind-cluster but are intended primarily for CI. They include packaging step which is too slow for the purpose of having convenient k8s "playground". kubeadm-dind-cluster uses Docker images from kubeadm-ci-dind.
• nkube starts Kubernetes-in-Kubernetes clusters.