Taking a glance at Rancher’s ability to manage the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Introduction

Pfew, it’s odd to admit that it has been a while since I’ve posted about Rancher. Though today is as good a day as any to pick up that thread… So today we’ll go through give or take the same objective as in the past, where we’ll notice that the integration has improved significantly with the arrival of AKS! Let’s get today’s post underway and deploy AKS from our Rancher control plane.

Preparation

Before the below started, I already had the following things ready ;

• A service principal with appropriate rights
• Installed Rancher 2.0

How to try out the experimental windows 2016 support in the Rancher 1.3.0 release candidate?

Introduction

Yesterday Rancher commented on my github request for windows support ;

Tested with rancher-server version – v1.3.0-rc1 with catalog “library” set to vnext branch in https://github.com/rancher/rancher-catalog

Able to add “Windows Server 2016 Standard Evaluation” hosts successfully to rancher environment with orchestration set to “windows”.

Able to launch containers in “nat” network and “transparent” network.

@kvaes , Windows 2016 support will be available as experimental feature in rancher-server 1.3.0 release.

Great news! Let’s take it out for a spin… 😀

 

Rancher Host

Installing the host(s) is the same as any other time…  Though the host will still be a Linux machine off course ;

sudo docker run -d –restart=unless-stopped -p 8080:8080 rancher/server:v1.3.0-rc1

Though notice that I specified the v1.3.0-rc1 tag… And let the system do its magic!

(Update : For the stable, release you can omit the -rc1 part!)

Note ; Be aware that this is an early release candidate. Do not use this for your production! There is for instance a bug with the GUI, where the “Auto”-theme is malfunctioning. So switch to light or dark to get that one fixed. 😉

Using Visual Studio Team Services & Rancher for continuous deployment for your docker containers

Introduction

Today I’m going to show you how you can leverage the combination of Visual Studio Team Services & Rancher to kickstart your continuous deployment of your docker containers. So every time we update our containers, we want a smooth upgrade process on our container setup. What do you think? Let’s see what this can look like?

 

The flow

The scenario of today will have the following flow ;

• We’ll use a git(hub) repository to store our docker-compose & rancher-compose file that powers our solution.
• Next up, we’ll be using VSTS as the orchestrator for your CI/CD-pipeline.
• Rancher is our preferred container workflow / management tool, and we’ll be using the “rancher-compose” on our VSTS build agent.

Integrating Azure Active Directory with Rancher

Introduction

Today we’ll be doing a post on how to integrate “Azure Active Directory” with my favorite docker orchestration tool “Rancher“. A few months back I issued a request towards the Rancher team (via Github) and it was added in the latest 1.1.0 release!

 

Authentication & Authorisation

So what can we do with it? The first thing I want to point out that in any identity process, there are two conceptual aspects;

• Authentication ; Here you provide a way to prove that you are really you… This can be done via user/pass, certificates, … and so on.
• Authorization ; Once your identity has been known, you can be granted with a given set of permissions (maybe grouped by role).

Why do I say this? It’s important to know that once you enable the AAD (Azure Active Directory) integration, this part will become responsible for the authentication part. Rancher UI (or Rancher Server) will remain responsible for the authorization part!

 

Identity Flow with the AAD integration

The following diagram will show you how the flow goes…

Autoscaling Docker hosts on Azure with Virtual Machine Scale Sets & Rancher

Introduction

A while back Mark Russinovich announced the public preview of the “Virtual Machine Scale Sets“;

VM Scale Sets are an Azure Compute resource you can use to deploy and manage a collection of virtual machines as a set. Scale sets are well suited for building large-scale services targeting big compute, big data, and containerized workloads – all of which are increasing in significance as cloud computing continues to evolve. Scale set VMs are configured identically, you just choose how many you need, which enables them to scale out and in rapidly and automatically.

So here we have a cloud service that would enable us to autoscale our hosts in terms of the load of the underlying systems. Now imaging combining this feature with Docker… I don’t know about your, but I’m excited about this premise! When combining this with Rancher, you could make your own Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS)! Today we’ll be delving into the matter to see how to implement this…

 

The Design

A quick extract from the ARM Resource Visualizer… when loading the ARM Template I have prepared for this deep dive.

Rancher End-to-End Service Example using an Owncloud-plus-mysql Deployment

Introduction

So what will we be doing today? We are going to leverage the power of the combination between docker containers & the rancher eco system. As a demonstration, we’ll be publishing “Owncloud” with a “mysql” backend. As we tend to like it a bit more secure, we’ll introduce a loadbalancer service as SSL termination. This as we want to keep our “Owncloud” as “vanilla” as possible. We’ll be pointing that service towards the outside world and will make it accessible via the “external dns”.

What can we optimize further about the design? (but is out-of-scope for today)

• Add sidekick containers for backup purposes
• Add data volume containers
• Introduce scalable worker containers (“Owncloud”)
• Introduce convoy for our data containers

Deploying Rancher Server via an Azure Resource Manager template

Introduction

In the previous posts we’ve been using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates for deploying our nodes. Today we’ll be using the same method to deploy a Rancher Server.

Be aware that this is to be used for demo / labo / source-for-inspiration, and not for production usage! Azure has a strict policy that server that are not setup in a redundant manner will not benefit from Service Level Agreements. So you definitely need a “High Availability” setup for that.

[FIX] Deploying Rancher Hosts via an Azure Resource Manager Template

A quick post in relation to the previous one ; Deploying Rancher Hosts via an Azure Manager Template

The template that was used at that time had a bug, where the “rancher overlay network” wasn’t working. Adding a public IP per host & introducing network security groups to publish the VPN ports (as mentioned before).

So if you’re using it, be sure to update to the latest version!

Deploying Rancher Hosts via an Azure Resource Manager Template

Introduction

In Azure there are two “generations” (so to speak) ;

• “Service Management” : the backend of the “old” portal
• “Resource Manager” : the backend of the “new” portal

The technology underneath differs quite a bit…Though the “Azure Resource Manager” (or “ARM”) has the possibility to work with templates for deployments.

In the last blog post, I showed you how you can deploy nodes in Azure from your Rancher host. Today we’ll do it the other way around… We’ll deploy hosts using an “ARM”-template and will connect back to our Rancher host in one quick move!

Rancher : Provisioning hosts on Azure

Introduction

At this time, Rancher has a great support for a variety of Cloud Providers, except… Azure. Though it possible to provision hosts to Azure via your Rancher interface!

We’ll be doing this via the “Other” link…

Steps for today?

• Setup Docker Machine
• Validate integration between Docker Machine & Azure
• Use Rancher to provision a host in Azure