As described in the Deployment with Docker, docker is a great tool for smaller deployments, where you are just running on a single machine and want to ramp up quickly. As you might expect, this is a not an ideal situation for production deployments.

Kubernetes can help you to build a scalable, flexible and resilient deployment. By introducing the concept of multi-nodes and deployments, you can make sure your Kerberos Agents are evenly distributed across your different machines, and you can add more nodes when you need to scale out.

We've provided an example deployment deployment-agent.yml in this directory, which show case you have to create a deployment (and under the hood a pod), to run a Kerberos Agent workload.

Create a Kerberos Agent deployment

It's always a best practices to isolate and structure your workloads in Kubernetes. To achieve this we are utilising the concept of namespaces. For this example we will create a new namespace demo.

kubectl create namespace demo

Now we have a namespace, have a look at deployment-agent.yml in this folder. This configuration file describes the Kubernetes resources we would like to create, and how the Kerberos Agent needs to behave: environment variables, container ports, etc. At the bottom of the file, we find a service part, this tells Kubernetes to expose the Kerberos Agent user interface on a publicly accessible IP address. Please note that you don't need to expose this, as you can configure the Kerberos Agent with a volume and/or environment variables.

Let's move on, and apply the Kerberos Agent deployment and service.

kubectl apply -f deployment-agent.yml -n demo

Watch deployment and service to be ready.

watch kubectl get all -n demo

When the deployment and service is created successfully, you should see something like this.

Every 2.0s: kubectl get all -n demo                     Fri Dec  9 16:33:17 2022

NAME                         READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
pod/agent-7c75c4dbcf-zxrb5   1/1     Running   0          19s

NAME                TYPE           CLUSTER-IP    EXTERNAL-IP       PORT(S)        AGE
service/agent-svc   LoadBalancer   10.x.x.x   108.x.x.x   80:32664/TCP   20s

NAME                    READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
deployment.apps/agent   1/1     1            1           20s

NAME                               DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
replicaset.apps/agent-7c75c4dbcf   1         1         1       20s

When copying the EXTERNAL-IP and pasting it in your browser, you should see the Kerberos Agent user interface. You can use the default username and password to sign-in, or if changed to your own (which is recommended).

Configure with volumes

Just like with docker, you can also attach volumes to the Kerberos Agent deployment, by creating a Persistent Volume and mount it to a specific directory.

Depending on where and how you are hosting the Kubernetes cluster, you may need to create a new storageClass or use a predefined storageClass from your cloud provider (Azure, GCP, AWS, ..). Have a look at deployment-agent-volume.yml to review a complete example.

template:
metadata:
    labels:
    app: agent
spec:
    volumes:
    - name: kerberos-data
        persistentVolumeClaim:
        claimName: kerberos-data
    ...
    containers:
    - name: agent
      image: kerberos/agent:latest
      volumeMounts:
        - name: kerberos-data
          mountPath: /home/agent/data/config
          subPath: config
    ...

Expose with Ingress

In the first example deployment-agent.yml we are using a LoadBalancer to expose the Kerberos Agent user interface; as shown below. If you are a bit more experienced with Kubernetes, you will know there are other service types as well.

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
...
type: LoadBalancer
ports:
    - port: 80
...

An alternative to LoadBalancer is Ingress. By leveraging an ingress such as ingress-nginx or traefik you setup a gateway (single point of contact), through which all communication to your apps (services) will flow.

A huge benefit (there are many others), is that you only allocate 1 public IP address for all your services. So instead of creating a LoadBalancer and thus a public IP address for every agent, you will create an Ingress service for each agent. Review the complete example at deployment-agent-with-ingress.yml.

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
name: agent-ingress
labels:
    name: agent-ingress
annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: nginx
    kubernetes.io/tls-acme: "true"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/ssl-redirect: "true"
    cert-manager.io/cluster-issuer: "letsencrypt-prod"
spec:
tls:
    - hosts:
        - "myagent.kerberos.io"
    secretName: agent-secret
rules:
- host: myagent.kerberos.io
    http:
    paths:
    - pathType: Prefix
        path: "/"
        backend:
        service:
            name: agent-svc
            port:
            number: 80