Kubernetes
KISS
If you are new to Kubernetes you might want to check out K3s first as it is easier to set up (less moving parts).
1 Master and 1 Node
Assumptions:
- Master and Node are on the same network (in this example
10.1.1.0/24
) - IP of the Master:
10.1.1.2
- IP of the first Node:
10.1.1.3
Caveats:
- this was only tested on
20.09pre215024.e97dfe73bba (Nightingale)
(unstable
) - this is probably not best-practice
- for a production-grade cluster you shouldn't use
easyCerts
- for a production-grade cluster you shouldn't use
- If you experience inability to reach service CIDR from pods, disable firewall via
networking.firewall.enable = false;
or otherwise make sure that it doesn't interfere with packet forwarding. - Make sure to set
docker0
in promiscuous modeip link set docker0 promisc on
Master
Add to your configuration.nix
:
{ config, pkgs, ... }:
let
# When using easyCerts=true the IP Address must resolve to the master on creation.
# So use simply 127.0.0.1 in that case. Otherwise you will have errors like this https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/59364
kubeMasterIP = "10.1.1.2";
kubeMasterHostname = "api.kube";
kubeMasterAPIServerPort = 6443;
in
{
# resolve master hostname
networking.extraHosts = "${kubeMasterIP} ${kubeMasterHostname}";
# packages for administration tasks
environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
kompose
kubectl
kubernetes
];
services.kubernetes = {
roles = ["master" "node"];
masterAddress = kubeMasterHostname;
apiserverAddress = "https://${kubeMasterHostname}:${toString kubeMasterAPIServerPort}";
easyCerts = true;
apiserver = {
securePort = kubeMasterAPIServerPort;
advertiseAddress = kubeMasterIP;
};
# use coredns
addons.dns.enable = true;
# needed if you use swap
kubelet.extraOpts = "--fail-swap-on=false";
};
}
Apply your config (e.g. nixos-rebuild switch
).
Link your kubeconfig
to your home directory:
ln -s /etc/kubernetes/cluster-admin.kubeconfig ~/.kube/config
Now, executing kubectl cluster-info
should yield something like this:
Kubernetes master is running at https://10.1.1.2
CoreDNS is running at https://10.1.1.2/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns:dns/proxy
To further debug and diagnose cluster problems, use 'kubectl cluster-info dump'.
You should also see that the master is also a node using kubectl get nodes
:
NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION
direwolf Ready <none> 41m v1.16.6-beta.0
Node
Add to your configuration.nix
:
{ config, pkgs, ... }:
let
kubeMasterIP = "10.1.1.2";
kubeMasterHostname = "api.kube";
kubeMasterAPIServerPort = 6443;
in
{
# resolve master hostname
networking.extraHosts = "${kubeMasterIP} ${kubeMasterHostname}";
# packages for administration tasks
environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
kompose
kubectl
kubernetes
];
services.kubernetes = let
api = "https://${kubeMasterHostname}:${toString kubeMasterAPIServerPort}";
in
{
roles = ["node"];
masterAddress = kubeMasterHostname;
easyCerts = true;
# point kubelet and other services to kube-apiserver
kubelet.kubeconfig.server = api;
apiserverAddress = api;
# use coredns
addons.dns.enable = true;
# needed if you use swap
kubelet.extraOpts = "--fail-swap-on=false";
};
}
Apply your config (e.g. nixos-rebuild switch
).
According to the NixOS tests, make your Node join the cluster:
on the master, grab the apitoken
cat /var/lib/kubernetes/secrets/apitoken.secret
on the node, join the node with
echo TOKEN | nixos-kubernetes-node-join
After that, you should see your new node using kubectl get nodes
:
NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION
direwolf Ready <none> 62m v1.16.6-beta.0
drake Ready <none> 102m v1.16.6-beta.0
N Masters (HA)
Troubleshooting
systemctl status kubelet
systemctl status kube-apiserver
kubectl get nodes
Join Cluster not working
If you face issues while running the nixos-kubernetes-node-join
script:
Restarting certmgr...
Job for certmgr.service failed because a timeout was exceeded.
See "systemctl status certmgr.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.
Go investigate with journalctl -u certmgr
:
... certmgr: loading from config file /nix/store/gj7qr7lp6wakhiwcxdpxwbpamvmsifhk-certmgr.yaml
... manager: loading certificates from /nix/store/4n41ikm7322jxg7bh0afjpxsd4b2idpv-certmgr.d
... manager: loading spec from /nix/store/4n41ikm7322jxg7bh0afjpxsd4b2idpv-certmgr.d/flannelClient.json
... [ERROR] cert: failed to fetch remote CA: failed to parse rootCA certs
In this case, cfssl
could be overloaded.
Restarting cfssl on the master
node should help: systemctl restart cfssl
Also, make sure that port 8888
is open on your master node.
DNS issues
Check if coredns is running via kubectl get pods -n kube-system
:
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
coredns-577478d784-bmt5s 1/1 Running 2 163m
coredns-577478d784-bqj65 1/1 Running 2 163m
Run a pod to check with kubectl run curl --restart=Never --image=radial/busyboxplus:curl -i --tty
:
If you don't see a command prompt, try pressing enter.
[ root@curl:/ ]$
nslookup google.com
Server: 10.0.0.254
Address 1: 10.0.0.254 kube-dns.kube-system.svc.cluster.local
Name: google.com
Address 1: 2a00:1450:4016:803::200e muc12s04-in-x0e.1e100.net
Address 2: 172.217.23.14 lhr35s01-in-f14.1e100.net
In case DNS is still not working I found that sometimes, restarting services helps:
systemctl restart kube-proxy flannel kubelet
reset to a clean state
Sometimes it helps to have a clean state on all instances:
- comment kubernetes-related code in
configuration.nix
nixos-rebuild switch
- clean up filesystem
rm -rf /var/lib/kubernetes/ /var/lib/etcd/ /var/lib/cfssl/ /var/lib/kubelet/
rm -rf /etc/kube-flannel/ /etc/kubernetes/
- uncomment kubernetes-related code again
nixos-rebuild switch
Miscellaneous
Rook Ceph storage cluster
Chances are you want to setup a storage cluster using rook.
To do so, I found it necessary to change a few things (tested with rook v1.2
):
- you need the
ceph
kernel module:boot.kernelModules = [ "ceph" ];
- change the root dir of the kubelet:
kubelet.extraOpts = "--root-dir=/var/lib/kubelet";
- reboot all your nodes
- continue with the official quickstart guide
- in
operator.yaml
, help the CSI plugins find the hosts' ceph kernel modules by adding (or uncommenting -- they're in the example config) these entries:
CSI_CEPHFS_PLUGIN_VOLUME: | - name: lib-modules hostPath: path: /run/current-system/kernel-modules/lib/modules/ CSI_RBD_PLUGIN_VOLUME: | - name: lib-modules hostPath: path: /run/current-system/kernel-modules/lib/modules/
NVIDIA
You can use NVIDIA's k8s-device-plugin.
Make nvidia-docker
your default docker runtime:
virtualisation.docker = {
enable = true;
# use nvidia as the default runtime
enableNvidia = true;
extraOptions = "--default-runtime=nvidia";
};
Apply their Daemonset:
kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NVIDIA/k8s-device-plugin/1.0.0-beta4/nvidia-device-plugin.yml
/dev/shm
Some applications need enough shared memory to work properly. Create a new volumeMount for your Deployment:
volumeMounts:
- mountPath: /dev/shm
name: dshm
and mark its medium
as Memory
:
volumes:
- name: dshm
emptyDir:
medium: Memory
Arm64
Nix might pull in coredns
and etcd
images that are incompatible with arm, To resolve this add the following to your master node's configuration:
etcd
...
services.kubernetes = {...};
systemd.services.etcd = {
environment = {
ETCD_UNSUPPORTED_ARCH = "arm64";
};
};
...
coredns
services.kubernetes = {
...
# use coredns
addons.dns = {
enable = true;
coredns = {
finalImageTag = "1.10.1";
imageDigest = "sha256:a0ead06651cf580044aeb0a0feba63591858fb2e43ade8c9dea45a6a89ae7e5e";
imageName = "coredns/coredns";
sha256 = "0c4vdbklgjrzi6qc5020dvi8x3mayq4li09rrq2w0hcjdljj0yf9";
};
};
...
};
Tooling
There are various community projects aimed at facilitating working with Kubernetes combined with Nix:
- kubernix: simple setup of development clusters using Nix
- kube-nix
- kubenix - GitHub (updated 2023)
- nixos-ha-kubernetes
References
- Issue #39327: kubernetes support is missing some documentation
- NixOS Discourse: Using multiple nodes on unstable
- Kubernetes docs
- NixOS e2e kubernetes tests: Node Joining etc.
- IRC (2018-09): issues related to DNS
- IRC (2019-09): discussion about
easyCerts
and general setup