Link Search Menu Expand Document

Example pre-requisite configuration

deployment kubernetes prerequisites

Example pre-requisite configuration

Creating the Kubernetes cluster is outside the scope of this guide.

Refer to: Microsoft Azure AKS documentation. The ability of creating AKS clusters with Windows support is currently in Preview. If you have multiple accounts in Azure then you will need to use the az account set -s <AccountName> so that you can set the right context for the deployment.

You must have:

  • a local install of kubectl configured to talk to the cluster
  • a local install of the CLI for helm.
  1. Create a service account. If you are using RBAC in your Kubernetes cluster you will need to grant permissions to Tiller for it to be able to create resources in the cluster. Check Helm’s documentation. In test environments, you may consider just granting Tiller cluster admin permissions:

    • Create a file with the following content

        apiVersion: v1
        kind: ServiceAccount
        metadata:
            name: tiller
            namespace: kube-system
        ---
        apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
        kind: ClusterRoleBinding
        metadata:
            name: tiller
        roleRef:
            apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
            kind: ClusterRole
            name: cluster-admin
        subjects:
        -   kind: ServiceAccount
            name: tiller
            namespace: kube-system
      

      In production scenarios you will have to be more restrictive with the permissions. See Helm’s documentation for advice on security for production environments

    • Run kubectl apply -f <path-of-file> to create the role binding

    If not using RBAC, you will need to run the following

     kubectl create serviceaccount --namespace kube-system tiller
        
     kubectl create clusterrolebinding tiller-cluster-rule --clusterrole=cluster-admin --serviceaccount=kube-system:tiller
        
     kubectl patch deploy --namespace kube-system tiller-deploy -p '{"spec":{"template":{"spec":{"serviceAccount":"tiller"}}}}
    
  2. If using RBAC, execute helm init --service-account tiller. This will install Tiller in the cluster, so you can install helm charts directly. If not using RBAC, do not use the service account parameter.

  3. Install the ingress controller:
     helm install stable/nginx-ingress \
         --namespace ingress \
         --name ingress  \
         --set rbac.create="true" \
    

    After a while the ingress controller will have a public IP that can be used to access the cluster. If you don’t want a public IP (because you have something else, like an application gateway in front of it), you can modify the installation of the ingress controller in the step above - see Helm chart documentation (controller.service.loadBalancerIP).

  4. To retrieve the public IP:

     kubectl get svc -n ingress -o wide -l 'component=controller'
    

    In your own DNS, configure that IP to whatever host you want to use for CluedIn. You could map it to a wildcard record; alternatively you can use more specific entries.

  5. Create a secret with your docker hub login credentials:

     kubectl create secret docker-registry  docker-registry-key \
         --docker-server='<repository-url>' \
         --docker-username='<your username>' \
         --docker-password='<your password>' \
         --docker-email='<your email>'
    

    For Docker Hub, the repository-url is docker.io. You should request access to the CluedIn Docker Hub repo for those credentials so you can pull the private Docker images with the application.

  6. Register the CluedIn helm chart

     helm repo add cluedin https://cluedin-io.github.io/CluedIn.Helm
     helm repo update
    

NOTE: You can also place secrets into a Vault or Key Vault from your cloud provider of choice.

Diagram

CluedIn Custom Resources for Kubernetes

Note: Only available in CluedIn v3.2.4 onwards

Custom resources are a set of versioned business objects that extend the Kubernetes API. The goal of these objects is to simply performing certain administrative tasks within CluedIn that would normally be quite complex.

CluedIn Custom Resources are monitored and actioned by the CluedIn Controller service.

Currently, two actions are supported: 1) Creating/Deleting a CluedIn organization 2) Enabling/Disabling SSO

Note: These guides assume you have access to the cluster via kubectl

Creating an organization

Note: This action would happen instead of the bootstrap mentioned above.

We will create a new organization called foobar by creating a Custom Resource (CR) and installing it into the Kubernetes cluster.

1) Create a secret to hold the administrator email and administrator password for the organization. We create a secret as this is sensitive data we wish to protect.

  kubectl create secret generic "foobar-admin" -n cluedin --from-literal=username="admin@foobar.com" --from-literal=password="Foobar23!"

.. this will create a resource that would look like:

  apiVersion: v1
  kind: Secret
  metadata:
    name: foobar-admin
  data:
    username: YWRtaW5AZm9vYmFyLmNvbQ==
    password: Rm9vYmFyMjMh

2) Create a custom resource for the new foobar organization. You can see we reference the secret name in the adminUserSecret property.

  # File: foobar-org.yaml
  apiVersion: "api.cluedin.com/v1"
  kind: Organization
  metadata:
    name: foobar-organization
  spec:
    name: "foobar"
    adminUserSecret: "foobar-admin"

.. you can apply the resource to the Kubernetes cluster to begin the creation process using :

  kubectl apply -n cluedin -f foobar-org.yaml

.. this will create a new organization in CluedIn and also create an administrator account with the email and password defined in the secret.

Checking Organization status

The STATUS field of an organization displays its current progress. You can list the Organization resources in a namespace by using :

kubectl get organizations -n cluedin

If the STATUS is Organization [foobar] activated then we know the foobar organization has been created successfully. A successfully created organization will also display an Organization ID. Any error messages from the process will be stored in the STATUS field and theController will re-try periodically.

Deleting an Organization

You can remove entirely remove an organization by deleting the custom Organization resource that was created previously.

It can be deleted by using the file it was created with ..

  kubectl delete -n cluedin -f foobar-org.yaml

.. or by using its name (e.g. foobar-organization) directly ..

kubectl delete organization -n cluedin foobar-organization

Warning: This action will also remove all data for the organization. Including SQL Server blob data, Neo4J indexes and ElasticSearch indexes.

Creating a resource for an existing Organization

If you need to create a reference Organization resource for an already existing organization (that was, for example, created by the bootstrap process), you just need to retrieve the Organization ID.

This can be found by running a query against the CluedIn databases.

SELECT [Id] FROM [DataStore.Db.Authentication].[dbo].[OrganizationAccount]

.. you can then create a new resource using that ID ..

  # File: foobar-ref.yaml
  apiVersion: "api.cluedin.com/v1"
  kind: Organization
  metadata:
    name: foobar-organization
  spec:
    name: "foobar"
    id: "d437b952-8bac-4194-ac51-8d23dd219e58"
    adminUserSecret: "foobar-admin"

.. The Controller will not create anything new but will allow deletion of the organization and enable reference by other CluedIn custom resources such as enabling SSO (see below).

Enable SSO

Note: This action requires an Organization custom resource to exist.

CluedIn currently only support Azure Active Directory for SSO.

You will need two bits of information from the Azure portal: 1) Client ID (also can be displayed as Application ID) 2) Client Secret

First, we need to create a secret to hold the sensitive clientSecret value.

kubectl create secret generic "foobar-sso" -n cluedin --from-literal=clientSecret="1234-5678-9ABC"
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: foobar-sso
data:
  clientSecret: c3RvcCBsb29raW5nIGF0IG15IHNlY3JldAo=

Next, we need to create the custom Feature resource ..

# File: foobar-sso.yaml
apiVersion: api.cluedin.com/v1
kind: Feature
metadata:
  name: foobar-enablesso
spec:
  enableSso:
    clientId: "5f9c3386-c9e3-4232-918b-ea9c303bf10e"
    organizationName: "foobar"
    clientSecretName: "foobar-sso"
    clientSecretKey: "clientSecret"
kubectl apply -n cluedin -f foobar-sso.yaml

Note: This action will cause Cluedin Server / CluedIn Processing / CluedIn Crawler to restart their pods. The RollingUpdate strategy should prevent any disruption but please only execute in a known maintenance window.

organizationName is the name of an existing organization (it will search the Organization resources for one with a spec.name field that matches.)

clientSecretName is the name of the secret we created in the previous step.

This process will update two SQL tables with this information and restart the pods of

Check SSO status

The STATUS field of a Feature displays its current progress. You can list the Feature resources in a namespace by using :

kubectl get features -n cluedin

If the STATUS is EnableSSO Feature [...] active. then we know SSO has been enabled. Any error messages from the process will be stored in the STATUS field and theController will re-try periodically.

Disable SSO

You can disable SSO by deleting the custom Feature resource that was created previously.

It can be deleted by using the file it was created with ..

  kubectl delete -n cluedin -f foobar-sso.yaml

.. or by using its name (e.g. foobar-enablesso) directly ..

kubectl delete feature -n cluedin foobar-enablesso

Note: This action will cause Cluedin Server / CluedIn Processing / CluedIn Crawler to restart their pods. The RollingUpdate strategy should prevent any disruption but please only execute in a known maintenance window.