A first look at the Couchbase Operator

A few weeks back, I took a look at Heptio Velero, formely known as Ark. Velero provides backup and restore capabilities for cloud native applications. During that research, I used a Couchbase DB as my application of choice for backup/restore. After speaking to Couchbase regarding that blog post, they strongly recommended I try the new Couchbase operator rather than the StatefulSet method that I was using for the application. Couchbase talk about the advantages of the operator approach over StatefulSets here. Now, while Couchbase provide steps on how to deploy Couchbase with their operator, they create it in the default…

Fun with PKS, K8s, MongoDB Helm Charts and vSAN

I’ve been spending a bit of time lately look at our Heptio Velero product, and how it works with various cloud native applications. Next application on my list is MongoDB, another NoSQL database. I looked at various deployment mechanisms for MongoDB, and it seems that using Helm Charts is the most popular approach. This led me to the Bitnami MongoDB Stack Chart GitHub Repo. At this point, I did spin my wheels a little trying to get MongoDB stood up. In this post, I’ll talk through some of the gotchas I encountered. Once again, my environment is vSphere 6.7 and…

Pivotal and Harbor – x509 certificate issues

After deploying and configuring the Harbor tile in Pivotal Ops Manager, I ran into a couple of issues with certificates. The first was encountered when I was  trying to login to harbor from an Ubuntu VM where I was running all of my PKS and BOSH commands. It was also the VM where I pulled my container  images, and the VM from which I now wanted to push them into Harbor. Harbor is our registry server for storing container images. Here is what I got on trying to login: cormac@pks-cli:~$ sudo docker login -u admin harbor.rainpole.com Password: Error response from…

PKS and NSX-T: Error: Timed out pinging after 600 seconds

I’m still playing with PKS 1.3 and NSX-T 2.3.1 in my lab. One issue that I kept encountering was that when on deploying my Kubernetes cluster, my master and worker nodes kept failing with a “timed out” trying to do a ping. A bosh task command showed the errors, as shown here. cormac@pks-cli:~$ bosh task Using environment ‘192.50.0.140’ as client ‘ops_manager’ Task 845 Task 845 | 16:56:36 | Preparing deployment: Preparing deployment Task 845 | 16:56:37 | Warning: DNS address not available for the link provider instance: pivotal-container-service/0c23ed00-d40a-4bfe-abee-1c Task 845 | 16:56:37 | Warning: DNS address not available for the…

Reviewing PKS logs and status

After a bit of a sabbatical, I am back to looking PKS (Pivotal Container Service) again. I wanted to look at the new version 1.3, but I had to do a bit of work on my environment to allow me to do this. Primarily, I needed to upgrade my NSX-T environment from version 2.1 to 2.3. I followed this blog post from vmtechie which provides a useful step-by-step guide. Kudos to our VMware NSX-T team as the upgrade worked without a hitch. My next step was to start work on the PKS deployment. I just did a brand new deployment…

Fun with PKS, K8s, VCP, StatefulSets and Couchbase

After just deploying the newest version of Pivotal Container Services (PKS) and rolling out my first Kubernetes cluster (read all about it here), I wanted to try to do something a bit more interesting than just create another persistent volume claim to test out our vSphere Cloud Provider since I had done this  a number of times already. Thanks to some of the work I have been doing with our cloud native team, I was introduced to StatefulSets. That peaked my interest a little, as I had not come across them before.

PKS deployment revisited – some changes in v1.2.2

It is almost 6 months since I last rolled out a deployment of Pivotal Container Service (PKS). I just did a new deployment this week using some of the more later builds of Pivotal Operations Manager (v2.3), and PKS (v1.2.2) and noticed a number of changes. This post is to take you through those changes and highlight where things are different and might catch you out. I am not going to go through all of the requirements from scratch – there are a number of posts already available which explain the command line tools that you need, and so on.…