setup

Dapr Cluster Setup

An opinionated deployment of Dapr on Kubernetes, configured with:

• Ingress with custom domain and TLS termination
  • NGINX for ingress controller and TLS to service mapping
  • letsencrypt as certificate provider
• KEDA for autoscaling
• Metrics Monitoring
  • Prometheus for metrics aggregation
  • Grafana for metrics visualization with Dapr monitoring dashboards
• Log Management
  • Fluentd for log collection and forwarding
  • Elasticsearch for log aggregation and query execution
  • Kibana for full-text log query and visualization
• Distributed Tracing
  • Jaeger for capturing traces, latency and dependency viewing

All demos in the dapr-demo repository are validated on this deployment

Prerequisites

• 1.15+ Kubernates cluster. If needed, you can setup cluster on:
  • AKS
  • GKE
  • AKS (coming)
• Tooling on the machine where you will be running this setup:
  • kubectl to do k8s stuff (brew install kubectl)
  • Helm 3 to install Dapr and its dependencies (brew install helm)
  • certbot to generate wildcard cert (brew install certbot)
• Domain name and access to the DNS service where you can manage that domain (required for letsencrypt challenge during cert generation and the A record creation to pont to the ingress gateway IP for custom domain support)

Setup

The following parameters can be used to configure your deployment. Define these as environment variables to set or override the default value:

DOMAIN            # default: example.com
DAPR_HA           # default: true
DAPR_LOG_AS_JSON  # default: true

Note, make sure the correct "target" cluster is set kubectl context (kubectl config current-context). You can lists all registered contexts using: kubectl config get-contexts, and if needed, set it using kubectl config use-context demo.

Usage

Start by navigate to the setup directory

Run make by itself to see the active configuration

To deploy and configure Dapr

• make dapr to install Dapr, KEDA, and the entire observability stack
• make config to perform post-install configurations

Optionally you can use make upgrade to in place upgrade Dapr to specific version

To configure external access

• make ip (optional) to create static IP in the cluster resource group
• make certs to create TLS certs using letsencrypt
• make ingress to configures NGINX ingress, SSL termination, Dapr API auth
• make dns to configure your DNS service for custom domain support
• make test to test deployment

To deploy in-cluster data services

• make redis to install Redis into the cluster
• make mongo to install Mongo into the cluster
• make kafka to install Kafka into the cluster

And few cluster operations helpers

• node-list to print node resources and their usage
• make ports to forward observability dashboards ports
• make pass to print the Grafana password (username: admin)

Then for each namespace you want to deploy Dapr apps to

• make namespace to create/configure namespace with service secrets

Accessing observability dashboards

To get access to the Kibana, Grafana, Zipkin dashboards run:

make ports

This will forward the necessary ports so you can access the dashboards using:

• kibana - http://localhost:5601
• grafana - http://localhost:8888
• zipkin - http://localhost:9411

To stop port forwarding run

make portstop

Help

To find the list of all the commands with their short descriptions run:

make help

Disclaimer

This is my personal project and it does not represent my employer. While I do my best to ensure that everything works, I take no responsibility for issues caused by this code.

License

This software is released under the MIT