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Remote Kubernetes Runtime

Threeport supports the management of Kubernetes clusters as remote runtimes. This pattern may be used to run workloads on separate Kubernetes clusters from the one that the Threeport API is deployed to.

Prerequisites

An instance of the Threeport is required to get started. You can install a Local Threeport instance and use it to create a remote Kubernetes runtime.

Note that AWS EKS clusters are currently the only supported type of remote Kubernetes runtime.

AWS Account Setup

First, create a work space on your local file system:

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mkdir threeport-runtime-test
cd threeport-runtime-test

To get started, a valid AwsAccount object must be created. Use the Basic AWS Setup guide for instructions.

Deployment

Kubernetes clusters are represented as KubernetesRuntime objects in the Threeport API.

Use the following command to download a sample Kubernetes Runtime config:

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curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/threeport/releases/main/samples/k8s-runtime.yaml

If you open the file it will look as follows:

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KubernetesRuntime:
  Name: eks-remote
  InfraProvider: eks
  InfraProviderAccountName: default-account
  HighAvailability: false
  Location: NorthAmerica:NewYork
  DefaultRuntime: true

The Name field is an arbitrary name for the user to assign.

The InfraProvider indicates we will use AWS EKS to spin up the Kubernetes cluster.

The InfraProviderAccountName references the name of the AWS account we created above.

The HighAvailability field determines the number of availability zones (AZs) the cluster will be installed across. When false it will installed across two AZs.

The Location field tells Threeport where to install the Kubernetes cluster. NorthAmerica:NewYork is a Threeport abstraction that allows users to reference a common set of locations, regardless of provider. For AWS, this translates to the us-east-1 region. When other cloud providers are supported, it will reference the appropriate region for the cloud provider being used. For now, you can reference the Threeport source code to see which locations map to which regions in AWS.

The DefaultRuntime field indicates that, when deploying workloads, if a Kubernetes Runtime is not specified, it will use this one by default.

Create a KubernetesRuntime instance: 

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tptctl create kubernetes-runtime --config k8s-runtime.yaml

View the status of the deployed Kubernetes runtime instance: 

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tptctl get kubernetes-runtime-instances

Note: if you would like to use kubectl against the cluster where Threeport is running and you have the AWS CLI installed you can update your kubeconfig with:

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aws eks update-kubeconfig --name threeport-test

Cleanup

Run the following command to delete the remote Kubernetes runtime instance: 

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tptctl delete kubernetes-runtime-instance --name eks-remote

Clean up the downloaded config files: 

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rm aws-account.yaml
rm k8s-runtime.yaml