Example Microservices App Running on Kind

This is an example application that includes:

• .NET Core 3.1 API application for a project tasks management service
• React.js front end running on Node.js to interact with our API
• Kind Kubernetes cluster configurations with an internal ingress controller
• Helm Charts to deploy the Kind Ingress Nginx Controller, the Web API, and the front end application

Prerequisites

• Docker CE for Windows v19.0.0 or later running Linux Containers
• Kubectl v1.18.0 or later
• Chocolatey v0.10.0 or later

Kind Overview

Kind solves a problem that all Kubernetes developers eventually face -- local resource exhaustion. The typical convention is to use Minikube to develop on a local Kubernetes cluster, but Minikube requires two VMs to run the control plane and worker node. In addition, Docker for Windows requires another VM to run any and all Linux containers. Let's just say that our laptop is already tired! Especially with IDEs, debuggers, package managers, and everything else that envelopes resources quickly. Or, maybe it's just Chrome with the 15 Stack Overflow and Reddit pages running? :P

Kind takes a different approach by setting up the control plane and worker node as containers in Docker utilizing the VM that's already built for running Linux containers on a Windows machine. This means less resource intensive development workloads since our Kubernetes cluster will only leverage a single VM that's already needed for Docker, and allows ephemeral clusters that can be built quickly and leveraged when needed.

Deploying the Kubernetes Cluster Using Kind

First, we'll start off by installing Kind. We'll be working on a Windows machine so we'll be using Chocolatey the Windows package manager. Use the following command to install Kind on your machine:

choco install kind -y

You can verify it was successfully installed by running:

kind version

This will output:

kind v0.8.1 go1.14.2 windows/amd64

Clone this repository to a directory of your choice:

git clone git@github.com:tonedefdev/microservice_app.git

Navigate to the kind directory from the cloned repo and run the following command to bring up the cluster:

kind create cluster --config=./kind-ingress-nginx-config.yaml

You'll see the following once it has completed:

Creating cluster "kind" ...
 ←[32m✓←[0m Ensuring node image (kindest/node:v1.18.2) 🖼
 ←[32m✓←[0m Preparing nodes 📦
 ←[32m✓←[0m Writing configuration 📜
 ←[32m✓←[0m Starting control-plane 🕹️
 ←[32m✓←[0m Installing CNI 🔌
 ←[32m✓←[0m Installing StorageClass 💾
Set kubectl context to "kind-kind"
You can now use your cluster with:
kubectl cluster-info --context kind-kind

Thanks for using kind! 😊

This will bootstrap a Kubernetes cluster using Docker containers for the control plane and worker nodes and will then merge the admin kubeconfig generated by Kind to your user directory enabling instant access to the cluster.

The configuration that we passed in supports ingress-nginx so that we can externally expose services within the cluster. Without this all cluster communication is internal to the cluster, and Kind by default isn't configured to support an ingress controller. The config that we passed in while creating our Kind cluster has a CRD (Custom Resource Defintion) that tells Kind to configure itself to work with ingress-nginx

Let's verify cluster access by running:

kubectl get nodes

We should see the following output if we followed this guide exactly:

NAME                 STATUS   ROLES    AGE   VERSION
kind-control-plane   Ready    master   41m   v1.18.2

If the STATUS shows NotReady you can watch the nodes with the following command until the STATUS is Ready:

kubectl get nodes -w

Next, we'll install Helm and then install the necessary charts to get the ingress-nginx controller deployed along with the API components.

Setup Helm and Deploy the Web API Components

Helm is THE package manager for Kubernetes...OK not really, but it's definitely the most popular for Kubernetes applications. It allows you to bundle Kubernetes manifests into a single package making them easier to deploy. Helm also supports templating using a Go based template syntax in addition to complete application lifecycle management. Everything you can do with Helm is out of the scope of this readme, but we'll introduce you to some of its concepts along the way.

Let's first install Helm via Chocolatey:

choco install kubernetes-helm -y

We can verify the installation by running:

helm version

Navigate to the artifacts directory from the repo we cloned ealier, and examine it. We'll start off by deploying the ingress-nginx controller artifact which is contained within the kind-ingress-nginx-0.1.0.tgz archive. We'll also use flags to have Helm create the namespace:

helm install kind-ingress-nginx ./kind-ingress-nginx-0.1.0.tgz --namespace=ingress-nginx --create-namespace

Typically you'd upload your Helm Charts to a repository and then add that repository to Helm. That can still be accomplished, but to speed up local development I find it easier to package the Helm Charts in archives, and deploy them locally. For example, to package the web-api Helm Chart we run the following Helm command in the root directory of the repo helm package ./helm/web-api/ -d ./artifacts

Helm will give the following output once it has finished deploying all of the resources for the ingress-nginx controller to your Kind cluster:

NAME: kind-ingress-nginx
LAST DEPLOYED: Mon Aug 24 21:23:11 2020
NAMESPACE: ingress-nginx
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1
NOTES:
1. Get the application URL by running these commands:
  export POD_NAME=$(kubectl get pods --namespace ingress-nginx -l "app.kubernetes.io/name=kind-ingress-nginx,app.kubernetes.io/instance=kind-ingress-nginx" -o jsonpath="{.items[0].metadata.name}")
  echo "Visit http://127.0.0.1:8080 to use your application"
  kubectl --namespace ingress-nginx port-forward $POD_NAME 8080:80

Now we'll deploy the web API for the application:

helm install web-api ./web-api-0.1.0.tgz --namespace=web-api --create-namespace

Once finished you should see:

NAME: web-api
LAST DEPLOYED: Mon Aug 24 21:24:26 2020
NAMESPACE: web-api
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1
NOTES:
1. Get the application URL by running these commands:
  http://localhost/api/ProjectTasksItems

We'll need to watch the ingress definition until ingress-nginx attaches an external address to the service:

kubectl get ingress -n web-api -w

It will be ready when we see localhost under ADDRESS:

NAME              CLASS    HOSTS       ADDRESS     PORTS   AGE
web-api-service   <none>   localhost   localhost   80      12m

Now we should be able to navigate to http://localhost/api/ProjectTasksItems and return the following:

[]

This is the expected output as the .NET Core Web API uses an in-memory database, so there is no data to be returned! We have just deployed two services to our cluster using Helm, and exposed our API using ingress-nginx so that our front end can interact with it once deployed. Let's do that now so we can actually use the API service.

Deploy the React Front End

Everything for the React front end has already been packaged for Helm and can be found in the artifacts directory. We'll need to navigate to the artifacts directory and run the following Helm command to deploy the service:

helm install react-frontend .\react-frontend-0.1.0.tgz --namespace=react-frontend --create-namespace

Once complete Helm should return the following:

NAMESPACE: react-frontend
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1
NOTES:
1. Get the application URL by running these commands:
  http://localhost/

This Helm chart deploys an ingress definition for the React application so we'll need to watch the ingress definition until our ingress-nginx controller binds an address to it before it can become accesible. Run the following command until ADDRESS displays localhost:

kubectl get ingress -n react-frontend -w

Now we can navigate to http://localhost and see our Project Tasks menu. Create a new task by selecting the New Task button, fill out the fields, and then you should see the new task card show up. Everything is now up and running successfully on our Kind cluster! We have a React frontend application service and a .NET Core API service with ingress defintions that control traffic in to the cluster.

Destroy the Kind Cluster

Now that we're done testing our deployment and have had a chance to examine the microservices deployed to the cluster we can destroy it. To do so simply run:

kind delete cluster

That's it! The cluster is now gone for good and so are all of the resources that were deployed to it.

That concludes this tutorial! One thing to keep in mind though is this application is definitely not production ready, and there's vast improvements that can be made, especially since the API is allowing CORS requests from any domain, on any method, not secure by any means, but I hope this gives you an idea of what is possible using Kind and how it can be leveraged to speed up development time when creating microservices with Kubernetes.

I hope this has been helpful for you and if you have any questions feel free to reach out!