Installation instructions

Initialize Helm with a serviceaccount for tiller

kubectl create serviceaccount --namespace kube-system tiller
kubectl create clusterrolebinding tiller-cluster-rule --clusterrole=cluster-admin --serviceaccount=kube-system:tiller

helm init --service-account tiller

Install or upgrade

# Update dependencies
helm dep up

# The name and namespace to use for the release is configurable
export RELEASE_NAME=nifi
export RELEASE_NAMESPACE=default

export CHART_PATH=.

# Minikube default unsecured install with one node
helm upgrade --install $RELEASE_NAME $CHART_PATH -f values-minikube.yaml -f values-unsecure.yaml --set replicaCount=1 --namespace $RELEASE_NAMESPACE

Decommission

Helm does not delete the PVCs created, so they have to be removed manually, after deleting the chart

helm delete $RELEASE_NAME --purge
kubectl delete pvc -l release=$RELEASE_NAME

Minikube setup instructions and tips

Setup hyperkit on a Mac

# The default driver for minikube is VirtualBox but on a Mac hyperkit is the preferred
# Install the hyperkit driver https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube/blob/master/docs/drivers.md#hyperkit-driver
curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/docker-machine-driver-hyperkit \
&& chmod +x docker-machine-driver-hyperkit \
&& sudo mv docker-machine-driver-hyperkit /usr/local/bin/ \
&& sudo chown root:wheel /usr/local/bin/docker-machine-driver-hyperkit \
&& sudo chmod u+s /usr/local/bin/docker-machine-driver-hyperkit

Start minikube with enough resources

minikube start --memory 8192 --cpus 4 --vm-driver=hyperkit

Once the cluster is up the kubernetes dashboard is available

minikube dashboard

Access NiFi cluster through the LoadBalancer

minikube service $RELEASE_NAME-apache-nifi-load-balancer

Switch to the docker environment running in the VM

eval $(minikube docker-env)

After that it is possible to use a locally built image instead of the default one. Example:

# build image
docker build -t myrepo/nifi-node:myversion docker/

# and use it in minikube
helm upgrade $RELEASE_NAME $CHART_PATH --reuse-values --namespace $RELEASE_NAMESPACE
 --set image.repository=myrepo --set image.tag=mytag --set image.pullPolicy=IfNotPresent

Todo items

• TLS setup for secure node communication
  • Put generated admin/user certs in secret store
• Move helper scripts to helm hooks to allow using the chart as a dependency
• StatefulSet fine tuning
  • poddistruptionbudget
• Set default resource request and limit
• Sticky session in LB
• Not all sysctl parameters are allowed to be configured currently:
  • vm.swappiness
  • net.ipv4.netfilter.ip_conntrack_tcp_timeout_time_wait

Notes on why we need to avoid having client side scripts with Helm

Currently there is one main scenario where we need a helper script - although presumably there will be more:

• Generating a secret shared token to use for the CA server and for the requesting clients

At first is seems we could generate the secret before running helm upgrade --install, but there are two issues with this:

• If we push secrets from the client side, we should use some sort of secret support for security. There are projects[1][2] that can be used for this, but they would then require consumers of this chart to utilize these tools as well, which would make it considerably harder to use.
• Running scripts before installation on the client side in general makes the chart unusable for clients without taking manual steps, since Helm has no builtin mechanism for managing client side scripts for good reasons.

What we can do is that we run our tools inside the cluster, for example as Kubernetes jobs. This is what the current scripts/secrets.sh is doing. It creates the necessary RBAC resources and a job to generate the required token and save it as a secret. However it is required to run before helm upgrade --install because some of the resources will need the secret to be ready for mounting it as a volume.

Hopefully helm hooks [3] will come to the rescue to allow running certain parts of the resources installed before the other, we will so how that goes...

[1] https://github.com/futuresimple/helm-secrets [2] https://github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets [3] https://github.com/kubernetes/helm/blob/master/docs/charts_hooks.md