Version 7.1 by Eduard Moraru on 2019/09/04
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| author | version | line-number | content |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | = Mentors: = | ||
| 2 | |||
| 3 | I want to thank my mentors Shubham Jain, Neha Gupta and Xwiki organisation for giving me such an opportunity and helping me out throughout my journey of GSOC. I also want to also thank Vincent Massol for helping me out in one of my dependent project. | ||
| 4 | |||
| 5 | = A little bit about me = | ||
| 6 | |||
| 7 | My name is Ashish Sharma, I am 23 and I am a final year student from Bharati Vidyapeeth's College of Engineering, India. I have participated in GSoC'19 program as a student in XWiki and worked on "Helm chart for Xwiki". | ||
| 8 | |||
| 9 | = What did I expect from GSoC 2019 = | ||
| 10 | |||
| 11 | This was my first Google Summer of Code and the concept to contribute for 3 months in an open-source organisation was exciting for me. I got an opportunity to work remotely on a project. I was curious to explore how an open-source organisation work. Anyway, I have expected new experience in remote internship, open source project contributing, Google Summer of Code participating and international only remote communication. | ||
| 12 | |||
| 13 | In this post I want to describe what I have finished and what is not completed yet and why. | ||
| 14 | |||
| 15 | = Description = | ||
| 16 | |||
| 17 | This project focoused on creating a helm chart that would deploy xwiki on Kubernetes by using helm templating. The deployment should be configurable to be scalacble, highly available and roboust. | ||
| 18 | |||
| 19 | = You can find the project code at = | ||
| 20 | |||
| 21 | https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/xwiki-helm and | ||
| 22 | |||
| 23 | = The issue tracker can be found = | ||
| 24 | |||
| 25 | https://jira.xwiki.org/projects/HELM/issues | ||
| 26 | |||
| 27 | = How to use the result of my work = | ||
| 28 | |||
| 29 | git clone https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/xwiki-helm | ||
| 30 | cd xwiki-helm-chart | ||
| 31 | helm dependency update | ||
| 32 | helm --debug upgrade -i --force xwiki -f ./values.yaml . | ||
| 33 | |||
| 34 | [[Read about prerequite>>https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/xwiki-helm]] | ||
| 35 | |||
| 36 | = Milestones = | ||
| 37 | |||
| 38 | == Milestones 1: == | ||
| 39 | |||
| 40 | === Creating a basic helm chart === | ||
| 41 | |||
| 42 | * Understanding xwiki's docker structure. | ||
| 43 | * Understanding and taking the decision for using the correct resource to host xwiki. | ||
| 44 | * So I started up using the StatefulSet, clusterIP service and ingress. | ||
| 45 | * Added values files which help in making the chart dynamically configurable. | ||
| 46 | * Then we neded to support multiple databases and was in a need of a solution that don't require to deploy database externally, so a good standard for adding dependency for other services like database were needed. | ||
| 47 | * So we decided to add database as a helm dependency, that helped us to templatise the databases in our application which makes deploying databases easier, we don't need to deploy the chart seprately. | ||
| 48 | * So we added support for database mysql and postgress through dependency and also given option for user to deploy it's own external database. | ||
| 49 | |||
| 50 | == Milestestone 2: == | ||
| 51 | |||
| 52 | === Adding support for ISTIO and other features === | ||
| 53 | |||
| 54 | * Till now we have a chart that would deploy our standalone application, now we need | ||
| 55 | * Added support for ISTIO | ||
| 56 | * Till now the helm were taking values from values file, we needed a way to manage our envoirnment variable that we pass to our container, and we also need to secure the sensetive variables like db password. For that I used Kubernetes resources configMaops and Secrets. These help us save and manage our variable securely and properly. | ||
| 57 | * Xwiki-helm also needed an optional feature to havdle Pod disruption, if the users have a heavy dependency on xwiki. This features make the xwiki chart user configure the minimum number of pods that should be running while pods are been destroyed due to any reason. | ||
| 58 | * A need for shared file storage were needed, secially when serviec provider like GKE does not provide //ReadWriteMany// option, so to run xwiki on cluster we need different database solution like Rook, I had researched about it and also written a blog on how to [[set up Rook on GKE for shared file system>>https://medium.com/@ashish932/f3abe23d9e79]] | ||
| 59 | |||
| 60 | == Milestone 3: == | ||
| 61 | |||
| 62 | === Adding support for clustering,HA and Unit testing === | ||
| 63 | |||
| 64 | * While moving towards HA and clustering we got to know that Xwiki need shared file storage for clustering which was not available in StatefulSet, so we made a desicion to migrate to Deployment. | ||
| 65 | * We needed to add test-cases so I added unit-testing. | ||
| 66 | * Clustering was required to take xwiki on HA. For that we need docker to enable option to configure clustering, so first I made changes in docker project and provided option to configure JGroups. | ||
| 67 | * Then I needed to provide the option in helm. For that I had to face another challenge to how to pass configuration files needed by JGroup from my helm chart to the container. For that I took the file in ConfigMaps and mounted the file to the xwiki pods. Also provided option to enable and disable JGroups. | ||
| 68 | * While enabling clustering we need to know which pods are avialable to accept request and which are dead so that we can route traffic accordingly, for that I needed to configure liveliness and readiness probes, so that kubernetes always get updated with the state of the container and if the container crashes it could restart the pod. | ||
| 69 | * Xwiki uses solr and the docker it embededs solr internally, but as suggested by Xwiki for performance improvement solr should be externalised, so I tried to add it as a dependency but failed due to an immature helm chart of solr, and how the xwiki configures solr, it was not possible with the current solr chart state. So for now I have exposed the basic parameter and the user has to manually setup solr and pass the url of the solr. |
