How To Provision a Production-Grade Kubernetes Cluster From Anywhere, With Just One Button (Literally)

Do you remember?

I bet all of you who are working or playing with Kubernetes still remember perfectly the first time you tried to install it.

And then the second time.

And then the third time.

…

And finally, the one that it worked.

And most likely, if you’re a professional you also remember the long path that brought you to own the required expertise on Kubernetes in order to set up and fine-tune production-grade clusters to run apps.

Or, if Kubernetes is not part of your job’s scope, you probably remember how much time it took for you to find someone able to perform a valid Kubernetes install…and how much it costed.

To save all this time and effort to our customers Cisco released Cisco Container Platform (CCP), a turnkey solution to easily provision production-grade Kubernetes clusters on-prem or in the cloud in minutes, with few mouse clicks and requiring little to no knowledge of K8s. All the required integrations in terms of network, storage and security are done automatically by CCP so that the provisioned K8s clusters are ready to run in production.  Clusters provisioned by CCP are already equipped with properly-configured monitoring and logging tools like ElasticSearch, FluentD, Kibana. Through the Container Network Interface (CNI) you can choose whether to leverage Cisco ACI as network infrastructure or other ones such as Contiv or Calico (no dependence on the underlying infrastructure). With CCP you can take care of the full life-cycle of the K8s cluster: you can easily perform Kubernetes software upgrades, nodes upgrade, cluster scale up or down and cluster deletion.

This is already good and if you are following our cloud announcements you might already know this, so I thought I’d create a demo that may push the simplicity of those “few mouse clicks” to its limit, making possible to create a production-grade cluster in just one click – literally.

Introducing the Kubernetes dash button.

The concept is fairly simple: build a dash button that, once pressed, creates a production-grade Kubernetes cluster ready to use.

Leveraging the rich set of the Cisco Container Platform (CCP) APIs this is even too easy, so I thought to add some more feature on top:

◈ I wanted to provision the cluster and access it just through the dash button. So, I wanted CCP to display on the dash button itself the IP address of the master node of the cluster created

◈ I wanted bi-directional communications between the dash-button and CCP itself, so that I can check on the dash button if CCP correctly received the provisioning request, and make sure that the provisioning process has started and then finished.

◈ I wanted a fair battery life that would avoid me having to recharge the button every day, so I needed to have electronics able to sleep or hibernate

◈ My lab, where I have the infrastructure and CCP, is behind a proxy, and therefore not accessible from the outside world, which meant I had to find a way to have my lab initiate communication with the dash button by actively checking the press of the button

◈ I wanted to use the button everywhere I go without worrying about the local Wi-Fi settings

How it works

To satisfy all the above requirements I added a couple of elements in the picture, ending up with the following architecture:

The button is based on an Arduino ESP 32 board, it connects via Wi-Fi to my smartphone and uses its internet connection, this way I can use the button everywhere my phone has data signal. A publish-subscribe message service (MQTT) on the internet is used to bypass the proxy limitations. I hosted the MQTT at home but you can provision one on AWS or use a free MQTT service on the cloud. Once pressed, the button publishes a special message on the MQTT service. Inside my lab, a couple of scripts are constantly polling the MQTT service and, as soon as they detect the special message, they invoke the right API in the Cisco Container Platform to trigger the provisioning of a shiny new Kubernetes cluster. Once the cluster is provisioned, the IP address of the master node is returned, through the MQTT service, to the dash button that shows it on its display, and, at this point the Kubernetes cluster is ready to accept connections and run applications.

I went to town with it and added a 3D printed enclosure to complete my project; I initially downloaded an existing model but then I decided to  leverage the capabilities of CCP to deploy K8s clusters on-prem and  in the cloud, so I designed the two different enclosures as you can see in the picture below, so I can have two different dash buttons for the two different deployment targets. 

Now, every time before I present my demo, I ask to my customers: “How much time and effort does it take you to install a production-grade, fully operationalized and secured Kubernetes cluster?” and whatever answer I get, I know I can answer “I can do it in 2 minutes blindfolded and cuffed”.