I will be speaking at CODE in New York!

Stay tuned for more details, but my presentation about Kubernetes was accepted for the CODE conference 2018 in New York City, March 8th. That is of course fantastic news 🙂

In more detail: I will present about the evolution of containers. From Docker, to Swarm, to container orchestrations systems, Kubernetes and managed Kubernetes (such as Oracle Container Engine or others). At the end I guess you will agree that Kubernetes is great and getting better every day, but you won’t like to manage your own Kubernetes cluster. Interesting enough, Bob Quillin summarised my CODE presentation as the new Oracle strategy really well.

Oracle CODE New York

Of course we will have a lot fun fun live coding with Mini, the Raspi cluster again. I plan to demo the setup of the cluster, service deployment, load balancing, failover etc. All this live on stage with hopefully a really big screen for the projection.

Serverless with Fn Project on Kubernetes for Docker (Mac)

Docker for Mac

Last week I deployed Fn Project on Kubernetes as a quick smoke test. Fn is the new serverless platform that was open sourced at Java One 2017. Running it on Kubernetes is easier than ever because Docker directly supports Kubernetes now, as announced at the last DockerCon. In the end it just worked without any issues.

To reproduce the steps, first of all make sure the latest version of Docker with Kubernetes support is installed properly and Kubernetes is enabled (in my case this is 17.12.0-ce-mac45 from the edge channel) .

Prerequisites and Checks

List the images of running Docker containers. This should show you the containers required for K8s if you enabled it in the Docker console under preferences:

$ docker container ls --format "table{\t{{.Image }}}"

Next, check if there are existing contexts. For example I have minikube and and GKE configured as well. Make sure the * (astericks) is set to docker-for-desktop:

$ kubectl config get-contexts
CURRENT   NAME                                         CLUSTER                                      AUTHINFO                                     NAMESPACE
*         docker-for-desktop                           docker-for-desktop-cluster                   docker-for-desktop                           
          gke_fmproject-194414_us-west2-a_fm-cluster   gke_fmproject-194414_us-west2-a_fm-cluster   gke_fmproject-194414_us-west2-a_fm-cluster   
          minikube                                     minikube                                     minikube                                  

If it is not set correctly, you can point kubectl to the correct Kubernetes cluster with the following command:

$ kubectl config use-context docker-for-desktop

Also you can see the running nodes:

$ kubectl get nodes
NAME                 STATUS    ROLES     AGE       VERSION
docker-for-desktop   Ready     master    9d        v1.8.2

Check out the cluster, it just consists of a single node:

$ kubectl cluster-info
Kubernetes master is running at https://localhost:6443
KubeDNS is running at https://localhost:6443/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns/proxy

Setup

To get better visibility into K8s I recommend to install the Kubernetes Dashboard:

$ kubectl create -f 
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/dashboard/master/src/deploy/recommended/kubernetes-dashboard.yaml

The dashboard is running in the kube-system namespace and you can check this with the following command:

$ kubectl get pods --namespace=kube-system

Enable Port Forwarding for the dashboard

Enable port forwarding to port 8443 with the following command and make sure to use the correct pod name:

$ kubectl port-forward kubernetes-dashboard-7798c48646-ctrtl 8443:8443 --namespace=kube-system

With a web browser connect to https://localhost:8443. When asked, allow access for the untrusted site and click on “Skip”.

Alternative to Port Forward: Proxy

Alternatively you could access it via the proxy service:

$ kubectl proxy

Then use the following URL with the browser

http://localhost:8001/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/https:kubernetes-dashboard:/proxy/

Microservice smoke test

The following steps are not necessary to run Fn project. However, I first deployed a small microservice to see if Kubernetes was running fine for me on my Mac. Feel free to skip that entirely. To copy what I did, you could follow the steps for load balancing a microservice with K8s

Fn on Kubernetes

Helm

Make sure your Kubernetes cluster is up and running and working correctly. We will use the K8s package manager Helm to install Fn.

Install Helm

Follow the instructions to [install Helm(https://docs.helm.sh/using_helm/#installing-helm) on your system, e.g. on a Mac it can be done with with brew. Helm will talk to Tiller, a deployment on the K8s cluster.

Init Helm and provision Tiller

$ helm init
$HELM_HOME has been configured at /Users/frank/.helm.

Tiller (the Helm server-side component) has been installed into your Kubernetes Cluster.
Happy Helming!

Install Fn

You can simply follow the instructions about installing Fn on Kubernetes. I put the steps here for completeness. First, let’s clone the fn-helm repo from github:

$ git clone https://github.com/fnproject/fn-helm.git && cd fn-helm

Install chart dependencies (from requirements.yaml):

$ helm dep build fn

Then install the chart. I chose the release name fm-release:

$ helm install --name fm-release fn

Then make sure to set the FN_API_URL as described in the output of the command above.

This should be it! You should see the following deployment from the K8s console.

Try to run a function. For more details checke the Fn Helm instruction on github.

Summary

Installing Fn on K8s with Helm should work on any Kubernetes cluster. Give it a try yourself, code some functions and run them on Fn / Kubernetes. Feel free to check out my Serverless slides.

Oracle CODE San Francisco Review: From Docker Swarm on a Raspi to Oracle Container Cloud Service (OCCS) with Wercker

Last month I presented at the Oracle CODE event in San Francisco. The presentation included almost 30 minutes of live hacking with Docker Swarm on a Raspberry Pi running Hypriot Linux. I was scheduled to speak at 8.30h in the morning and still an amazing number of 90 people showed up – thanks guys! The presentation was recorded – so you can enjoy it from the comfort of your living room.

The presentation is online here:

You can get the slides from slideshare.com:

Oracle CODE Mexico City 2017

A fortnight ago I was travelling to Mexico City / Santa Fe to speak at the Oracle CODE event. It was a huge event, relaxed atmosphere and everybody seemed to have a great time learning new tech. Gossip was spreading that over 2000 people signed up for it.

Myself, I did a live-hacking session, explaining the reasoning from building an ‘artesania’ Docker Swarm cluster to moving to Oracle Container Cloud Service (OCCS) and Wercker. This included a complete CI/CD workflow: based on a simple git commit for a Spring Boot application, building a new Docker image that will be stored on Docker hub, and then pushed to OCCS . Yes, live on stage 🙂 and live in the cloud.

Maybe the biggest impact on my session had the Mexico vs. Germany football match that just ended a few minutes before my presentation. After Mexico not winning 1:4 against GER there were still some 100 people in the mood to attend my live hacking session. Many of those showed up afterwards to say hello and ask advanced questions which was a pleasant surprise!

This is part of the group. Can you spot Mini, the cluster?  🙂

Even after walking out of my session and hanging around in the foyer, I got heaps of questions from people asking me about clustering Docker containers, the reasoning and difficulty of building a Raspberry Pi based Docker cluster, how OCCS differs to all of this and why and how Oracle is involved in Docker.

Have you been there? Something worth to repeat? Share your opinion about the event as a comment.

 

Cloud, Microservices and Container Workshop in South Africa!

Lot’s of people are talking about these topics nowadays. Heaps of slides and samples are available for download, lots of presentations can simply be streamed from youtube.

In Johannesburg we were working with these solutions hands-on: I delivered a 3 day Cloud, Microservices and Containers workshop on behalf of Oracle.

Find attached some impressions from the smart and fun group of devs and architects I was working with.