Deploy AWS SSM agent to CoreOS

November 8, 2018 Josh Reichardt Leave a comment

If you have been a CoreOS user for long you will undoubtedly have noticed that there is no real package management system. If you’re not familiar, the philosophy of CoreOS is to avoid using a package manager and instead rely heavily on leveraging the power of Docker containers along with a few system level tools to manage servers. The problem that I just recently stumbled across is that the AWS SSM agent is packaged into debian and RPM formats and is assumed to be installed with a package manager, which obviously won’t work on CoreOS. In the remainder of this post I will describe the steps that I took to get the SSM agent working on a CoreOS/Dockerized server. Overall I am very happy with how well this solution turned out.

To get started, there is a nice tutorial here for using the AWS Session Manager through the the console. The most important thing that needs to be done before “installing” the SSM agent on the CoreOS host is to set up the AWS instance with the correct permissions for the agent to be able to communicate with AWS. For accomplishing this, I created a new IAM role and attached the AmazonEC2RoleForSSM policy to it through the AWS console.

After this step is done, you can bring up the ssm-agent.

Install the ssm-agent

After ensuring the correct permissions have been applied to the server that is to be manager, the next step is to bring up the agent. To do this using Docker, there are some tricks that need to be used to get things working correctly, notably, fixing the PID 1 zombie reaping problem that Docker has.

I basically lifted the Dockerfile from here originally and adapted it into my own public Docker image at jmreicha/ssm-agent:latest. In case readers want to go try this, my image is a little bit newer than the original source and has a few tweaks. The Dockerfile itself is mostly straight forward, the main difference is that the ssm-agent process won’t reap child processes in the default Debian image.

In order to work around the child reaping problem I substituted the slick Phusion Docker baseimage, which has a very simple process manager that allows shells spawned by the ssm-agent to be reaped when they get terminated. I have my Dockerfile hosted here if you want to check out how the phusion baseimage version works.

Once the child reaping problem was solved, here is the command I initially used to spin up the container, which of course still didn’t work out of the box.

docker run \
  -v /var/run/dbus:/var/run/dbus \
  -v /run/systemd:/run/systemd \
 jmreicha/ssm-agent:latest

I received the following errors.

2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [OfflineService] Starting document processing engine...
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [OfflineService] [EngineProcessor] Starting
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [OfflineService] [EngineProcessor] Initial processing
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [OfflineService] Starting message polling
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [OfflineService] Starting send replies to MDS
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [LongRunningPluginsManager] starting long running plugin manager
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [LongRunningPluginsManager] there aren't any long running plugin to execute
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [HealthCheck] HealthCheck reporting agent health.
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [MessageGatewayService] Starting session document processing engine...
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [MessageGatewayService] [EngineProcessor] Starting
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [LongRunningPluginsManager] There are no long running plugins currently getting executed - skipping their healthcheck
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [StartupProcessor] Executing startup processor tasks
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [StartupProcessor] Unable to open serial port /dev/ttyS0: open /dev/ttyS0: no such file or directory
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [StartupProcessor] Attempting to use different port (PV): /dev/hvc0
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [StartupProcessor] Unable to open serial port /dev/hvc0: open /dev/hvc0: no such file or directory
2018-11-05 17:42:27 ERROR [StartupProcessor] Error opening serial port: open /dev/hvc0: no such file or directory
2018-11-05 17:42:27 ERROR [StartupProcessor] Error opening serial port: open /dev/hvc0: no such file or directory. Retrying in 5 seconds...
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [MessageGatewayService] Successfully created ssm-user
2018-11-05 17:42:27 ERROR [MessageGatewayService] Failed to add ssm-user to sudoers file: open /etc/sudoers.d/ssm-agent-users: no such file or directory
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [MessageGatewayService] [EngineProcessor] Initial processing
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [MessageGatewayService] Setting up websocket for controlchannel for instance: i-0d33006836710e7ef, requestId: 2975fe0d-846d-4256-9d50-57932be03925
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [MessageGatewayService] listening reply.
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [MessageGatewayService] Opening websocket connection to: %!(EXTRA string=wss://ssmmessages.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/v1/control-channel/i-0d33006836710e7ef?role=subscribe&stream=input)
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [MessageGatewayService] Successfully opened websocket connection to: %!(EXTRA string=wss://ssmmessages.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/v1/control-channel/i-0d33006836710e7ef?role=subscribe&stream=input)
2018-11-05 17:42:27 INFO [MessageGatewayService] Starting receiving message from control channel
2018-11-05 17:42:32 INFO [StartupProcessor] Unable to open serial port /dev/ttyS0: open /dev/ttyS0: no such file or directory
2018-11-05 17:42:32 INFO [StartupProcessor] Attempting to use different port (PV): /dev/hvc0
2018-11-05 17:42:32 INFO [StartupProcessor] Unable to open serial port /dev/hvc0: open /dev/hvc0: no such file or directory
2018-11-05 17:42:32 ERROR [StartupProcessor] Error opening serial port: open /dev/hvc0: no such file or directory
2018-11-05 17:42:32 ERROR [StartupProcessor] Error opening serial port: open /dev/hvc0: no such file or directory. Retrying in 5 seconds...
2018-11-05 17:42:35 INFO [MessagingDeliveryService] [Association] No associations on boot. Requerying for associations after 30 seconds.

The first error that jumped out in logs is the “Unable to open serial port”. There is also an error referring to not being able to add the ssm-user to the sudoers file.

The fix for these issues is to add a Docker flag to the CoreOS serial device, “–device=/dev/ttyS0” and a volume mount to the sudoers path, “-v /etc/sudoers.d:/etc/sudoers.d”. The full Docker run command is shown below.

docker run -d --restart unless-stopped --name ssm-agent \
  --device=/dev/ttyS0 \
  -v /var/run/dbus:/var/run/dbus \
  -v /run/systemd:/run/systemd \
  -v /etc/sudoers.d:/etc/sudoers.d \
  jmreicha/ssm-agent:latest

After fixing the errors found in the logs, and bringing up the containerized SSM agent, go ahead and create a new session in the AWS console.

The session should come up pretty much immediately and you should be able to run commands like you normally would.

The last thing to (optionally) do is run the agent as a systemd service to take advantage of some capabilities to start it up automatically if it dies or start it if the server gets rebooted. You can probably just get away with using the docker restart policy too if you aren’t interested in configuring a systemd service, which is what I have chosen to do for now.

You could even adapt this Docker image into a Kubernetes manifest and run it as a daemonset on each node of the cluster if desired to simplify things and add another layer of security. I may return to the systemd unit and/or Kubernetes manifest in the future if readers are interested.

Conclusion

The AWS Session manager is a fantastic tool for troubleshooting/debugging as well as auditing and security.

With SSM you can make sure to never expose specific servers to the internet directly, and you can also keep track of what kinds of commands have been run on the server. As a bonus, the AWS console helps keeps track of all the previous sessions that were created and if you hook up to Cloudwatch and/or S3 you can see all the commands and times that they were run with nice simple links to the log files.

SSM allows you to do a lot of other cool stuff like run scripts against either a subset of servers which can be filtered by tags or against all servers that are recognized by SSM. I’m sure there are some other features as well, I just haven’t found them yet.

Building k8s Manifests with Helm Templates

August 30, 2018August 30, 2018 Josh Reichardt Leave a comment

As I have started working more with Kubernetes lately I have found it very valuable to see what a manifest looks like before deploying it. Helm can basically be used as a quick and dirty way to see what a rendered Helm template looks like. This provides the security advantages of not running tiller in your production cluster if you choose to deploy the rendered templates locally.

Helm has been sort of a subject for contention for awhile now. Security folks REALLY don’t like running the server side component because it basically allows root access into your cluster, unless it is managed a specific way, which tends to add much more complexity to the cluster. There are plans in Helm 3 to remove the server side component as well as offering some more flexible configuration options that don’t rely on the Go templating, but that functionality not ready yet so I find rendering and deploying a nice middle ground for now.

At the same time, Helm does have some nice selling points which make it a nice option for certain situations. I’d say the main draw to Helm is that it is ridiculously easy to set up and use, which is especially nice for things like local development or testing or just trying to figure out how things work in Kubernetes. The other thing that Helm does that is difficult to do otherwise, is it manages deployments and versions and environments, although there have been a number of users that have had issues with these features.

Also check out Kustomize. If you aren’t familiar, it is basically a tool for managing per environment customizations for yaml manifests and configurations. You can get pretty far by rendering templates and overlaying kustomize on top of other configurations for managing different environments, etc.

Render a template (client side)

The first step to getting a working rendered template is to install the Helm client side component. There are installation instruction for various different platforms here.

brew install kubernetes-helm # (on OSX)

You will also need to grab some charts to test with.

git clone [email protected]:kubernetes/charts.git
cd charts/stable/metallb
helm template --namespace test --name test .

Below is an example with customized variables.

helm template --namespace test --name test --set controller.resources.limits.cpu=100m .

You can dump the rendered template to a file if you want to look at it or change anything.

helm template --namespace test --name test --set controller.resources.limits.cpu=100m . > helm-test.yaml

You can even deploy these rendered templates directly if you want to.

helm template --namespace test --name test --set controller.resources.limits.cpu=100m . | kubectl -f -

Render a template (server side)

Make sure tiller is running in the cluster first. If you haven’t set up Helm on the server side before you basically set up tiller to run in the cluster. Again, I would not recommend doing this on anything outside of a throw away or testing environment. After the helm client has been installed you can use it to spin up tiller in the cluster.

helm init

Below is a basic example using the metallb chart.

helm install --namespace test --name test stable/metallb --dry-run --debug

Again, you can use customized variables.

helm install --namespace test --name test stable/metallb --set controller.resources.limits.cpu=100m --dry-run --debug

You may notice some extra configurations at the very beginning of the output. This is basically just showing default values that get applied as well as things that have been customized by the user. It is a quick way to see what kinds of things can be changed in the Helm chart.

Conclusion

Helm offers many other commands and options so I definitely recommend playing around with it and exploring the other things it can do.

I like to use both of these methods, but for now I just prefer to run a local tiller instance in a throwaway cluster (Docker for Mac) and pull in charts from the upstream repositories without having to git clone charts if I’m just looking at how the Kubernetes manifest configuration works. You can’t really use the server side rendering though to actually deploy the manifests because it sticks a bunch of other information into the command output.

All in all the Helm templating is pretty powerful and combining it with something like kustomize should get you to around 90% of where you need to be, unless you are managing much more complex and complicated configurations. The only thing that this method doesn’t lend itself very well to is managing releases and other metadata. Otherwise it is a great way to manage configurations.

Exploring Docker Manifests

July 14, 2018July 30, 2018 Josh Reichardt 1 Comment

As part of my recent project to build an ARM based Kubernetes cluster (more on that in a different post) I have run into quite a few cross platform compatibility issues trying to get containers working in my cluster.

After a little bit of digging, I found that support was added in version 2.2 of the Docker image specification for manifests, which all Docker images to built against different platforms, including arm and arm64. To add to this, I just recently discovered that in newer versions of Docker, there is a manifest sub-command that you can enable as an experimental feature to allow you to interact with the image manifests. The manifest command is great for exploring Docker images without having to pull and run and test them locally or fighting with curl to get this information about an image from a Docker registry.

Enable the manifest command in Docker

First, make sure to have a semi recent version of Docker installed, I’m using 18.03.1 in this post.

Edit your docker configuration file, usually located in ~/.docker/config.json. The following example assumes you have authentication configured, but really the only additional configuration needed is the { “experimental”: “enabled” }.

{
  "experimental": "enabled",
    "auths": {
    "https://index.docker.io/v1/": {
      "auth": "XXX"
    }
  }
}

After adding the experimental configuration to the client you should be able to access the docker manifest commands.

docker manifest -h

To inspect a manifest just provide an image to examine.

docker manifest inspect traefik

This will spit out a bunch of information about the Docker image, including schema, platforms, digests, etc. which can be useful for finding out which platforms different images support.

{
   "schemaVersion": 2,
   "mediaType": "application/vnd.docker.distribution.manifest.list.v2+json",
   "manifests": [
      {
         "mediaType": "application/vnd.docker.distribution.manifest.v2+json",
         "size": 739,
         "digest": "sha256:36df85f84cb73e6eee07767eaad2b3b4ff3f0a9dcf5e9ca222f1f700cb4abc88",
         "platform": {
            "architecture": "amd64",
            "os": "linux"
         }
      },
      {
         "mediaType": "application/vnd.docker.distribution.manifest.v2+json",
         "size": 739,
         "digest": "sha256:f98492734ef1d8f78cbcf2037c8b75be77b014496c637e2395a2eacbe91e25bb",
         "platform": {
            "architecture": "arm",
            "os": "linux",
            "variant": "v6"
         }
      },
      {
         "mediaType": "application/vnd.docker.distribution.manifest.v2+json",
         "size": 739,
         "digest": "sha256:7221080406536c12abc08b7e38e4aebd811747696a10836feb4265d8b2830bc6",
         "platform": {
            "architecture": "arm64",
            "os": "linux",
            "variant": "v8"
         }
      }
   ]
}

As you can see above image (traefik) supports arm and arm64 architectures. This is a really handy way for determining if an image works across different platforms without having to pull an image and trying to run a command against it to see if it works. The manifest sub command has some other useful features that allow you to create, annotate and push cross platform images but I won’t go into details here.

Manifest tool

I’d also like to quickly mention the Docker manifest-tool. This tool is more or less superseded by the built-in Docker manifest command but still works basically the same way, allowing users to inspect, annotate, and push manifests. The manifest-tool has a few additional features and supports several registries other than Dockerhub, and even has a utility script to see if a given registry supports the Docker v2 API and 2.2 image spec. It is definitely still a good tool to look at if you are interested in publishing multi platform Docker images.

Downloading the manifest tool is easy as it is distributed as a Go binary.

curl -OL https://github.com/estesp/manifest-tool/releases/download/latest/manifest-tool-linux-amd64
mv manifest-tool-linux-amd64 manifest-tool
chmod +x manifest-tool

One you have the manifest-tool set up you can start usuing it, similar to the manifest inspect command.

./manifest-tool inspect traefik

This will dump out information about the image manifest if it exists.

Name:   traefik (Type: application/vnd.docker.distribution.manifest.list.v2+json)
Digest: sha256:eabb39016917bd43e738fb8bada87be076d4553b5617037922b187c0a656f4a4
 * Contains 3 manifest references:
1    Mfst Type: application/vnd.docker.distribution.manifest.v2+json
1       Digest: sha256:e65103d16ded975f0193c2357ccf1de13ebb5946894d91cf1c76ea23033d0476
1  Mfst Length: 739
1     Platform:
1           -      OS: linux
1           - OS Vers:
1           - OS Feat: []
1           -    Arch: amd64
1           - Variant:
1           - Feature:
1     # Layers: 2
         layer 1: digest = sha256:03732cc4924a93fcbcbed879c4c63aad534a63a64e9919eceddf48d7602407b5
         layer 2: digest = sha256:6023e30b264079307436d6b5d179f0626dde61945e201ef70ab81993d5e7ee15

2    Mfst Type: application/vnd.docker.distribution.manifest.v2+json
2       Digest: sha256:6cb42aa3a9df510b013db2cfc667f100fa54e728c3f78205f7d9f2b1030e30b2
2  Mfst Length: 739
2     Platform:
2           -      OS: linux
2           - OS Vers:
2           - OS Feat: []
2           -    Arch: arm
2           - Variant: v6
2           - Feature:
2     # Layers: 2
         layer 1: digest = sha256:8996ab8c9ae2c6afe7d318a3784c7ba1b1b72d4ae14cf515d4c1490aae91cab0
         layer 2: digest = sha256:ee51eed0bc1f59a26e1d8065820c03f9d7b3239520690b71fea260dfd841fba1

3    Mfst Type: application/vnd.docker.distribution.manifest.v2+json
3       Digest: sha256:e12dd92e9ae06784bd17d81bd8b391ff671c8a4f58abc8f8f662060b39140743
3  Mfst Length: 739
3     Platform:
3           -      OS: linux
3           - OS Vers:
3           - OS Feat: []
3           -    Arch: arm64
3           - Variant: v8
3           - Feature:
3     # Layers: 2
         layer 1: digest = sha256:78fe135ba97a13abc86dbe373975f0d0712d8aa6e540e09824b715a55d7e2ed3
         layer 2: digest = sha256:4c380abe0eadf15052dc9ca02792f1d35e0bd8a2cb1689c7ed60234587e482f0

Likewise, you can annotate and push image manifests using the manifest-tool. Below is an example command for pushing multiple image architectures.

./manifest-tool --docker-cfg '~/.docker' push from-args --platforms "linux/amd64,linux/arm64" --template jmreicha/example:test --target "jmreicha/example:test"

mquery

I’d also like to touch quickly on the mquery tool. If you’re only interested in seeing if a Docker image uses manifest as well as high level multi-platform information you can run this tool as a container.

docker run --rm mplatform/mquery traefik

Here’s what the output might look like. Super simple but useful for quickly getting platform information.

Image: traefik
 * Manifest List: Yes
 * Supported platforms:
   - linux/amd64
   - linux/arm/v6
   - linux/arm64/v8

This can be useful if you don’t need a solution that is quite as heavy as manifest-tool or enabling the built in Docker experimental support.

You will still need to figure out how to build the image for each architecture first before pushing, but having the ability to use one image for all architectures is a really nice feature.

There is work going on in the Docker and Kubernetes communities to start leveraging the features of the 2.2 spec to create multi platform images using a single name. This will be a great boon for helping to bring ARM adoption to the forefront and will help make the container experience on ARM much better going forward.

Export SNMP metrics with the Prometheus Operator

April 17, 2018May 3, 2018 Josh Reichardt Leave a comment

There are quite a few use cases for monitoring outside of Kubernetes, especially for previously built infrastructure and otherwise legacy systems. Additional monitoring adds an extra layer of complexity to your monitoring setup and configuration, but fortunately Prometheus makes this extra complexity easier to manage and maintain, inside of Kubernetes.

In this post I will describe a nice clean way to monitor things that are internal to Kubernetes using Prometheus and the Prometheus Operator. The advantage of this approach is that it allows the Operator to manage and monitor infrastructure, and it allows Kubernetes to do what it’s good at; make sure the things you want are running for you in an easy to maintain, declarative manifest.

If you are already familiar with the concepts in Kubernetes then this post should be pretty straight forward. Otherwise, you can pretty much copy/paste most of these manifests into your cluster and you should have a good way to monitor things in your environment that are external to Kubernetes.

Below is an example of how to monitor external network devices using the Prometheus SNMP exporter. There are many other exporters that can be used to monitor infrastructure that is external to Kubernetes but currently it is recommended to set up these configurations outside of the Prometheus Operator to basically separate monitoring concerns (which I plan on writing more about in the future).

Create the deployment and service

Here is what the deployment might look like.

apiVersion: apps/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: snmp-exporter
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: snmp-exporter
  template:
    metadata:
    labels:
      app: snmp-exporter
  spec:
    containers:
    - image: oakman/snmp-exporter
    command: ["/bin/snmp_exporter"]
    args: ["--config.file=/etc/snmp_exporter/snmp.yml"]
    name: snmp-exporter
    ports:
    - containerPort: 9116
      name: metrics

And the accompanying service.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  labels:
    app: snmp-exporter
  name: snmp-exporter
spec:
  ports:
  - name: http-metrics
    port: 9116
    protocol: TCP
    targetPort: metrics
  selector:
    app: snmp-exporter

At this point you would have a pod in your cluster, attached to a static IP address. To see if it worked you can check to make sure a service IP was created. The service is basically what the Operator uses to create targets in Prometheus.

kubectl get sv

From this point you can 1) set up your own instance of Prometheus using Helm or by deploying via yml manifests or 2) set up the Prometheus Operator.

Today we will walk through option 2, although I will probably cover option 1 at some point in the future.

Setting up the Prometheus Operator

The beauty of using the Prometheus Operator is that it gives you a way to quickly add or change Prometheus specific configuration via the Kubernetes API (custom resource definition) and some custom objects provided by the operator, including AlertManager, ServiceMonitor and Prometheus objects.

The first step is to install Helm, which is a little bit outside of the scope of this post but there are lots of good guides on how to do it. With Helm up and running you can easily install the operator and the accompanying kube-prometheus manifests which give you access to lots of extra Kubernetes metrics, alerts and dashboards.

helm repo add coreos https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/coreos-charts/stable/
helm install --name prometheus-operator --set rbacEnable=true --namespace monitoring coreos/prometheus-operator
helm install coreos/kube-prometheus --name kube-prometheus --namespace monitoring

After a few moments you can check to see that resources were created correctly as a quick test.

kubectl get pods -n monitoring

NOTE: You may need to manually add the “prometheus” service account to the monitoring namespace after creating everything. I ran into some issues because Helm didn’t do this automatically. You can check this with kubectl get events.

Prometheus Operator configuration

Below are steps for creating custom objects (CRDs) that the Prometheus Operator uses to automatically generate configuration files and handle all of the other management behind the scenes.

These objects are wired up in a way that configs get reloaded and Prometheus will automatically get updated when it sees a change. These object definitions basically convert all of the Prometheus configuration into a format that is understood by Kubernetes and converted to Prometheus configuration with the operator.

First we make a servicemonitor for monitoring the the snmp exporter.

apiVersion: monitoring.coreos.com/v1
kind: ServiceMonitor
metadata:
  labels:
    k8s-app: snmp-exporter
    prometheus: kube-prometheus # tie servicemonitor to correct Prometheus
  name: snmp-exporter
spec:
  jobLabel: k8s-app
  selector:
    app: snmp-exporter
  namespaceSelector:
    matchNames:
    - monitoring

  endpoints:
  - interval: 60s
    port: http-metrics
    params:
      module:
      - if_mib # Select which SNMP module to use
      target:
      - 1.2.3.4 # Modify this to point at the SNMP target to monitor
    path: "/snmp"
    targetPort: 9116

Next, we create a custom alert and tie it our Prometheus Operator. The alert doesn’t do anything useful, but is a good demo for showing how easy it is to add and manage alerts using the Operator.

Create an alert-example.yml configuration file, add it as a configmap to k8s and mount it in as a configuration with the ruleSelector label selector and the prometheus operator will do the rest. Below shows how to hook up a test rule into an existing Prometheus (kube-prometheus) alert manager, handled by the prometheus-operator.

kind: ConfigMap
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
 name: josh-test
 namespace: monitoring
 labels:
 role: alert-rules # Standard convention for organizing alert rules
 prometheus: kube-prometheus # tie to correct Prometheus
data:
 test.rules.yaml: |
 groups:
 - name: test.rules # Top level description in Prometeheus
 rules:
 - alert: TestAlert
 expr: vector(1)

Once you have created the rule definition via configmap just use kubectl to create it.

kubectl create -f alert-example.yml -n monitoring

Testing and troubleshooting

You will probably need to port forward the pod to get access to the IP and port in the cluster

kubectl port-forward snmp-exporter-<name> 9116

Then you should be able to visit the pod in your browser (or with curl).

localhost:9116

The exporter itself does a lot more so you will probably want to play around with it. I plan on covering more of the details of other external exporters and more customized configurations for the SNMP exporter.

For example, if you want to do any sort of monitoring past basic interface stats, etc. you will need to generate and build your own set of MIBs to gather metrics from your infrastructure and also reconfigure your ServiceMonitor object in Kubernetes to use the correct MIBs so that the Operator updates the configuration correctly.

Conclusion

The amount of options for how to use Prometheus is one area of confusion when it comes to using Prometheus, especially for newcomers. There are lots of ways to do things and there isn’t much direction on how to use them, which can also be viewed as a strength since it allows for so much flexibility.

In some situations it makes sense to use an external (non Operator managed Prometheus) when you need to do things like manage and tune your own configuration files. Likewise, the Prometheus Operator is a great fit when you are mostly only concerned about managing and monitoring things inside Kubernetes and don’t need to do much external monitoring.

That said, there is some support for external monitoring using the Prometheus Operator, which I want to write about in a different post. This support is limited to a handful of different external exporters (for the time being) so the best advice is to think about what kind of monitoring is needed and choose the best solution for your own use case. It may turn out that both types of configurations are needed, but it may also end up being just as easy to use one method or another to manage Prometheus and its configurations.

Mount a volume using Ignition and Terraform

April 1, 2018 Josh Reichardt Leave a comment

Sometimes when provisioning a server you may want to configure and provision storage as part of the bootstrapping and booting process. For example, the other day I ran into an issue where I needed to define a disk, partition it, mount it to a specified location and then create a few directories in it. It turned out to be surprisingly not straight forward to provision this storage and I learned quite a few things that I thought were worth sharing.

I’d just like to mention that ignition works like magic. If you aren’t familiar, Ignition is basically a tool to help provision and configure servers, very similar to cloud-config except by default Ignition only runs once, on first boot. The magic of Ignition is that it injects itself into initramfs before the OS ever eve boots and manipulating the system. Ignition can be read in from remote URL so that it can easily be provisioned in bare metal infrastructures. There were several pieces to this puzzle.

The first was getting down all of the various ignition configuration components in Terraform. Nothing was particularly complicated, there was just a lot of trial and error to get everything working. Terraform has some really nice documentation for working with Ignition configurations, I’d recommend starting there and just playing around to figure out some of the various bits and pieces of configuration that Ignition can do. There is some documentation on Ignition troubleshooting as well which I found to be helpful when things weren’t working correctly.

Below each portion of the Ignition configuration gets declared inside of a “ignition_config” block. The Ignition configuration then points towards each invidual component that we want Ignition to configure. e.g. systemd, filesystem, directories, etc.

data "ignition_config" "staging_rancher_host_stateful" {
  systemd = [
     "${data.ignition_systemd_unit.mount_data.id}",
  ]

  filesystems = [
    "${data.ignition_filesystem.data_fs.id}",
  ]

  directories = [
    "${data.ignition_directory.data_dir.id}",
  ]

  disks = [
    "${data.ignition_disk.data_disk.id}",
  ]
}

This part of the setup is pretty straight forward. Create a data block with the needed ignition configuration to mount the disk to the correct location, format the device if it hasn’t already been formatted and create the desired directory and then create the Systemd unit to configure the mount point for the OS. Here’s what each of the data blocks might look like.

data "ignition_filesystem" "data_fs" {
   name = "data"

  mount {
    device = "/dev/xvdb1"
    format = "ext4"
  }
}

data "ignition_directory" "data_dir" {
  filesystem = "data"
  path = "/data"
  uid = 500
  gid = 500
}

data "ignition_disk" "data_disk" {
  device = "/dev/xvdb"

  partition {
    number = 1
    start = 0
    size = 0
  }
}

Next, create the Systemd unit.

data "ignition_systemd_unit" "mount_data" {
  content = "${file("./data.mount")}"
  name = "data.mount"
}

Another challenge was getting the Systemd unit to mount the disk correctly. I don’t work with Systemd frequently so initially had some trouble figuring this part out. Basically, Systemd expects the service/unit definition name to EXACTLY match what’s declared inside the “Where” clause of the service definition.

For example, the following configuration needs to be named data.mount because that is what is defined in the service.

[Unit]
Description=Mount /data
Before=local-fs.target

[Mount]
What=/dev/xvdb1
Where=/data
Type=ext4

[Install]
WantedBy=local-fs.target

After all the kinks have been worked out of the Systemd unit(s) and other above Terraform Ignition configuration you should be able to deploy this and have Ignition provision disks for you automatically when the OS comes up. This can be extended as much as needed for getting initial disks set up correctly and is a huge step in automating your infrastructure in a nice repeatable way.

There is currently an open issue with Ignition currently where it breaks when attempting to re-provision a previously configured disk on a new machine. Basically the Ignition process chokes because it sees the device has already been partitioned and formatted and can’t do it again. I ran into this scenario where I was trying to create a basically floating persistent data EBS volume that gets attached to servers in an autoscaling group and wanted to allow the volume to be able to move around freely if the server gets killed off.