Tag Archives: Google cloud

Kubernetes on Google cloud

Cloud Platforms, Containers & Kubernetes, , ,

In this blog, I will cover the steps to run Kubernetes on Google compute VM. I used the steps mentioned here.

Pre-requisites:

  • Need Google cloud account.
  • Install Google cloud SDK.

First step is to download and unzip Kubernetes tar file from here.
Next, we create the cluster using the provided script.

export KUBERNETES_PROVIDER=gce
./cluster/kube-up.sh

The above script creates the clusters with 1 master and 4 minions. Also, it sets up all necessary services both in master and minions node.
Lets look at the VMs created:

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Kubernetes – Overview

Cloud Platforms, Containers & Kubernetes, , , ,

Earlier, I had written a blog on Docker Orchestration. This is a pretty new area and different solutions are being developed to address this problem. Few weeks back, I had written a blog on AWS EC2 Container service. Kubernetes is a Docker Orchestration engine used to manage a cluster of Containers. Google initially developed Kubernetes, currently its an open source project and source code is available here. Google Cloud’s Container engine uses Kubernetes to manage Docker Containers. Kubernetes can be used standalone or with any Cloud service like AWS, EC2.

Kubernetes basics:

Following are basic building blocks within Kubernetes:

  • Cluster(master and minion) – This is the cluster of machines where Container services are launched on. There is 1 master node and the other nodes are called as worker nodes or minions. The master node runs etcd configuration database service, scheduler to schedule the containers, api server for external clients to talk to, replication controller to manage the state of containers. The minion node runs a slave agent to talk to the master node.
  • Pods – can be a single container or a collection of containers. Containers within a pod share same characteristics and are brought up and teared down together. They are normally launched on same minion. An example could be a pod containing redis master and slave database containers. Pod configuration is defined as a json file.
  • Service – Service is an abstraction over Pod that is useful for Service discovery and exposing environment variables to other services. Example could be a database service exposing port numbers to web service.
  • Labels – Labels are used with Pods and Services for easier management of Containers through filters. Rather than managing individual Pods and Services, Containers can be managed at Label level. For example, we can say destroy all “frontend” labels.

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Google Cloud – Getting started

Cloud Platforms, ,

I have used AWS for most of my Cloud related needs. Recently, I tried out Google Cloud and I will share some of my experiences with Google Cloud in this blog.

The easiest way to get started is to signup for the 60 day trial. This gives 300$ of credit to use Google Cloud for 60 days. It is necessary to register using a credit card.

Google cloud services can be accessed either using Developer’s console, CLI, SDK. It is needed to create atleast a single project to get started. First, I created a project using the Developer’s console. Developer’s console can be accessed from here.

Installing and using gcloud SDK:

Use the procedure here to install SDK.
Following are the steps that I did to install SDK in Ubuntu 14.04 VM running in Virtualbox:

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Docker Orchestration

Cloud Platforms, Containers & Kubernetes, Distributed Systems, , , , ,

This blog is part of my ongoing series on Docker containers. Orchestrating Containers is a pretty complex task and there is a lot of work ongoing to solve this particular problem. There are big companies, startups as well as Opensource projects involved with this work. There are many different technologies and projects ongoing that got me really confused when I started looking at this. In this blog, I have tried to break down the Docker orchestration problem into smaller pieces and have tried to map different existing/developing solutions into the smaller pieces. Considering that the technologies are evolving and that my knowledge in this area is limited, this blog might need updates and corrections as we move forward. Also, I might have missed few technologies as well as companies..

Problem statement:

Docker does a great job in packaging and transporting single containers. Following are specific problems we need to address:

  • Distributed Applications split between multiple containers.
  • Manage a large number of containers both in terms of allocating the containers to the cluster of hosts as well as handling container failures.

Orchestration blocks:

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