worker node Archives - Shogan.tech

This is the third post in this series and the focus will be on completing the Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster by adding a worker node. You’ll also setup a software based load-balancer implementation designed for bare metal Kubernetes Clusters by leveraging MetalLB.

Here are some handy links to other parts in this blog post series:

By now you should have 1 x Pi running as the dedicated Pi network router, DHCP, DNS and jumpbox, as well as 1 x Pi running as the cluster Master Node.

Of course it’s always best to have more than 1 x Master node, but as this is just an experimental/fun setup, one is just fine. The same applies to the Worker nodes, although in my case I added two workers with each Pi 4 having 4GB RAM.

Joining a Worker Node to the Cluster

Start off by completing the setup steps as per the Common Setup section in Part 2 with your new Pi.

Once your new Worker Pi is ready and on the network with it’s own static DHCP lease, join it to the cluster (currently only the Master Node) by using the kubeadm join command you noted down when you first initialised your cluster in Part 2.

E.g.

sudo kubeadm join 10.0.0.50:6443 --token kjx8lp.wfr7n4ie33r7dqx2 \
     --discovery-token-ca-cert-hash sha256:25a997a1b37fb34ed70ff4889ced6b91aefbee6fb18e1a32f8b4c8240db01ec3

After a few moments, SSH back to your master node and run kubectl get nodes. You should see the new worker node added and after it pulls down and starts the weave net CNI image it’s status will change to Ready.

Setting up MetalLB

The problem with a ‘bare metal’ Kubernetes cluster (or any self-installed, manually configured k8s cluster for that matter) is that it doesn’t have any load-balancer implementation to handle LoadBalancer service types.

When you run Kubernetes on top of a cloud hosting platform like AWS or Azure, they are backed natively by load-balancer implementations that work seamlessly with those cloud platform’s load-balancer services. E.g. classic application or elastic load balancers with AWS.

However, with a Raspberry Pi cluster, you don’t have anything fancy like that to provide LoadBalancer services for your applications you run.

MetalLB provides a software based implementation that can work on a Pi cluster.

Install version 0.8.3 of MetalLB by applying the following manifest with kubectl:

kubectl apply -f https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Shogan/d418190a950a1d6788f9b168216f6fe1/raw/ca4418c7167a64c77511ba44b2c7736b56bdad48/metallb.yaml

Make sure the MetalLB pods are now up and running in the metallb-system namespace that was created.

Now you will create a ConfigMap that will contain the settings your MetalLB setup will use for the cluster load-balancer services.

Create a file called metallb-config.yaml with the following content:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  namespace: metallb-system
  name: config
data:
  config: |
    address-pools:
    - name: default
      protocol: layer2
      addresses:
      - 10.23.220.88-10.23.220.98

Update the addresses section to use whichever range of IP addresses you would like to assign for use with MetalLB. Note, I only used 10 addresses as below for mine.

Apply the configuration:

kubectl apply -f ./metallb-config.yaml

Setup Helm in the Pi Cluster

First of all you’ll need an ARM compatible version of Helm. Download it and move it to a directory that is in your system PATH. I’m using my Kubernetes master node as a convenient location to use kubectl and helm commands from, so I did this on my master node.

Install Helm Client

export HELM_VERSION=v2.9.1
wget https://kubernetes-helm.storage.googleapis.com/helm-$HELM_VERSION-linux-arm.tar.gz
tar xvzf helm-$HELM_VERSION-linux-arm.tar.gz
sudo mv linux-arm/helm /usr/bin/helm

Install Helm Tiller in the Cluster

Use the following command to initialise the tiller component in your Pi cluster.

helm init --tiller-image=jessestuart/tiller --service-account tiller --override spec.selector.matchLabels.'name'='tiller',spec.selector.matchLabels.'app'='helm' --output yaml | sed 's@apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1@apiVersion: apps/v1@' | kubectl apply -f -

Note: it uses a custom image from jessestuart/tiller (as this is ARM compatible). The command also replaces the older api spec for the deployment with the apps/v1 version, as the older beta one is no longer applicable with Kubernetes 1.16.

Deploy an Ingress Controller with Helm

Now that you have something to fulfill LoadBalancer service types (MetalLB), and you have Helm configured, you can deploy an NGINX Ingress Controller with a LoadBalancer service type for your Pi cluster.

helm install --name nginx-ingress stable/nginx-ingress --set rbac.create=true --set controller.service.type=LoadBalancer

If you list out your new ingress controller pods though you might find a problem with them running. They’ll likely be trying to use x86 architecture images instead of ARM. I manually patched my NGINX Ingress Controller deployment to point it at an ARM compatible docker image.

kubectl set image deployment/nginx-ingress-controller     nginx-ingress-controller=quay.io/kubernetes-ingress-controller/nginx-ingress-controller-arm:0.26.1

After a few moments the new pods should now show as running:

new nginx ingress pods running with ARM image

Now to test everything, you can grab the external IP that should have been assigned to your NGINX ingress controller LoadBalancer service and test the default NGINX backend HTTP endpoint that returns a simple 404 message.

List the service and get the EXTERNAL-IP (this should sit in the range you configured MetalLB with):

kubectl get service --selector=app=nginx-ingress

Curl the NGINX Ingress Controller LoadBalancer service endpoint with a simple GET request:

curl -i http://10.23.220.88

You’ll see the default 404 not found response which indicates that the controller did indeed receive your request from the LoadBalancer service and directed it appropriately down to the default backend pod.

Concluding

At this point you’ve configured:

A Raspberry Pi Kubernetes network Router / DHCP / DNS server / jumpbox
Kubernetes master node running the master components for the cluster
Kubernetes worker nodes
MetalLB load-balancer implementation for your cluster
Helm client and Tiller agent for ARM in your cluster
NGINX ingress controller

In part 1, recall you setup some iptables rules on the Router Pi as an optional step?

These PREROUTING AND POSTROUTING rules were to forward packets destined for the Router Pi’s external IP address to be forwarded to a specific IP address in the Kubernetes network. In actual fact, the example I provided was what I used to forward traffic from the Pi router all the way to my NGINX Ingress Controller load balancer service.

Revisit this section if you’d like to achieve something similar (access services inside your cluster from outside the network), and replace the 10.23.220.88 IP address in the example I provided with the IP address of your own ingress controller service backed by MetalLB in your cluster.

Also remember that at this point you can add as many worker nodes to the cluster as you like using the kubeadm join command used earlier.

I’ve recently been doing a fair bit of automation work on bringing up AWS managed Kubernetes clusters using Terraform (with Packer for building out the worker group nodes). Read on for some handy tips on troubleshooting EKS worker nodes.

Some of my colleagues have not worked with EKS (or Kubernetes) much before and so I’ve also been sharing knowledge and helping others get up to speed. A colleague was having trouble with their newly provisioned personal test EKS cluster found that the kube-system / control plane related pods were not starting. I assisted with the troubleshooting process and found the following…

Upon diving into the logs of the kube-system related pods (dns, aws CNI, etc…) it was obvious that the pods were not being scheduled on the brand new cluster. The next obvious command to run was kubectl get nodes -o wide to take a look at the general state of the worker nodes.

Unsurprisingly there were no nodes in the cluster.

Troubleshooting worker nodes not joining the cluster

The first thing that comes to mind when you have worker nodes that are not joining the cluster on startup is to check the bootstrapping / startup scripts. In EKS’ case (and more specifically EC2) the worker nodes should be joining the cluster by running a couple of commands in the userdata script that the EC2 machines run on launch.

If you’re customising your worker nodes with your own custom AMI(s) then you’ll most likely be handling this userdata script logic yourself, and this is the first place to check.

The easiest way of checking userdata script failures on an EC2 instance is to simply get the cloud-init logs direct from the instance. Locate the EC2 machine in the console (or the instance-id inspect the logs for failures on the section that logs execution of your userdata script.

In the EC2 console: Right-click your EC2 instance -> Instance Settings -> Get System Log.
On the instance itself:
- cat /var/log/cloud-init.log | more
- cat /var/log/cloud-init-output.log | more

Upon finding the error you can then check (using intuition around the specific error message you found):

Have any changes been introduced lately that might have caused the breakage?
Has the base AMI that you’re building on top of changed?
Have any resources that you might be pulling into the base image builds been modified in any way?

These are the questions to ask and investigate first. You should be storing base image build scripts (packer for example) in version control / git, so check the recent git commits and image build logs first.

Building a Pi Kubernetes Cluster – Part 3 – Worker Nodes and MetalLB