Using fluxCD to Deploy ECK

3-minute read
devops
kubernetes • cloud

Prerequisites

  • A Kubernetes cluster with a kubeconfig file set up to access the cluster remotely. You can use minikube (https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube/releases) to set it up in your local environment faster.
  • flux cli tool — use your favorite package manager for your OS to install it. For me it’s Chocolatey on Windows.
choco install flux

After it’s installed, let’s check our cluster to confirm it satisfies the flux prerequisites:

$ flux check --pre
► checking prerequisites
✔ kubernetes 1.23.4 >=1.20.6-0
✔ kubectl 1.23.4 >=1.20.6-0
✔ prerequisites checks passed

Now we can bootstrap our cluster. Check out the fluxCD getting started page for more information on this.

Creating a Git Repository Resource

We’ll need to create a GitRepository source which the SourceController uses to create an artifact that can be referenced later.

In your Terminal, type/paste the following command:

$ flux create source git eck-operator --url=https://github.com/elastic/cloud-on-k8s --tag="2.2.0" --branch=main --namespace=flux-system --interval=5m

With the expected output:

apiVersion: source.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v1beta1
kind: GitRepository
metadata:
  name: eck-operator
  namespace: flux-system
spec:
  interval: 5m
  url: https://github.com/elastic/cloud-on-k8s
  ref:
    branch: master

A few things to note here:

  • name defines the name of the artifact.
  • namespace defines the namespace it will operate in. flux docs set it at default or flux-system.
  • spec.interval defines how often the Source Controller checks for updates.
  • spec.url defines the repository. For a GitRepository resource, this is the repository URL for whichever Helm chart you want to deploy — it must be the root, otherwise it won’t work.

Creating a HelmRelease Resource

We need to create a HelmRelease resource to apply the Helm chart by referencing the artifact created by our SourceController above.

In your Terminal, type/paste the following command:

$ flux create hr eck-operator --interval=1m --source=GitRepository/eck-operator --chart=./deploy/eck-operator --namespace=flux-system

With the expected output:

apiVersion: helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v2beta1
kind: HelmRelease
metadata:
  name: eck-operator
  namespace: flux-system
spec:
  interval: 5m
  chart:
    spec:
      chart: ./deploy/eck-operator
      sourceRef:
        kind: GitRepository
        name: eck-operator
        namespace: flux-system
      interval: 1m

A few things to note:

Most of the definitions are the same as above.

  • spec.interval references the interval at which we reconcile the HelmRelease.
  • chart.spec.chart the relative path of the Helm chart in the Git repo.
  • chart.spec.sourceRef defines what SourceRef the HelmRelease should pull from. In this case we’re referencing our GitRepository eck-operator SourceRef in the flux-system namespace.
  • chart.spec.interval defines how often we check the Source (our GitRepository Source) for updates. Default is the previously defined HelmReleaseSpec.Interval.

Awesome! So now we can run a command to check out our HelmRelease deploy:

$ flux get helmreleases --all-namespaces

And…

NAMESPACE       NAME            REVISION      SUSPENDED    READY   MESSAGE
flux-system     eck-operator                    False           False   install retries exhausted

Oops.

Troubleshooting

So I came across a problem that’s an ongoing discussion as a GitHub issue. Applying the solution and…

NAMESPACE       NAME            REVISION      SUSPENDED       READY   MESSAGE
flux-system     eck-operator    2.2.0           False           True    Release reconciliation succeeded

Success!

Turns out the Helm release states were broken and suspending and resuming them solves the problem. But we are not done yet. Let’s check out our pods to see that they are actually running.

$ kubectl get pods --all-namespaces

kube

Ok, so our namespace is flux-system and our pod is elastic-operator-0 and we can see that it’s running.

Great!

What next?

Well, we’ve successfully deployed the ECK operator on minikube via a Helm chart on the Elastic git repo, with flux. Pretty cool, right? But what’s the point? We can now start deploying Elastic apps via the ECK operator which I’ll be covering as we go along.

Thanks for stopping by.