Deploying a RabbitMQ Application into an Kubernetes orchestrated Azure Container Service Cluster

20 Apr 2017

Reading time ~6 minutes

Deploying a RabbitMQ Application into an Kubernetes orchestrated Azure Container Service Cluster

In this example we will be deploying a RabbitMQ application into a Kubernetes orcherstrated cluster on Azure Container Service.

Azure Container Service makes it simpler for you to create, configure, and manage a cluster of virtual machines that are preconfigured to run containerized applications. It uses an optimized configuration of popular open-source scheduling and orchestration tools. This enables you to use your existing skills, or draw upon a large and growing body of community expertise, to deploy and manage container-based applications on Microsoft Azure.

Prerequisites

Windows 10 - With the Windows 10 anniversay edition you may need to turn off Secure Boot in the BIOS of your machine in order for the SF cluster to run locally
Visual Studio 2015 with Update 2 or Later
Azure CLI
Python 3.6
Pika-Python
Erlang
Kubectl
Windows Powershell
Visual Studio Team Services Account
Microsoft Azure Subscription
Docker for Windows

Create an ACS Cluster with Kubernetes

Create a Service Principal

Create a service principal in Azure Active Directory for use in your Kubernetes cluster, Azure provides several methods.

The following example commands show you how to do this with the Azure CLI 2.0. You can alternatively create a service principal using Azure PowerShell, the classic portal, or other methods.

az login

az account set --subscription "mySubscriptionID"

az ad sp create-for-rbac --role="Contributor" --scopes="/subscriptions/mySubscriptionID"

Confirm your service principal by opening a new shell and run the following commands, substituting in appId, password, and tenant:

az login --service-principal -u yourClientID -p yourClientSecret --tenant yourTenant

az vm list-sizes --location westus

For more info on how to create a service principal check out this document.

Pass the service Principal client ID and client secret and deploy

Download the template parameters file azuredeploy.parameters.json included in this directory.

To specify the service principal, enter values for servicePrincipalClientId and servicePrincipalClientSecret in the file. (You also need to provide your own values for dnsNamePrefix and sshRSAPublicKey. The latter is the SSH public key to access the cluster.) Save the file.

On Windows run Bash and follow this guide to create a new SSH key and add it to the ssh-agent


ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "youremail@address.com"

Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):

Enter same passphrase again:

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Run the following command, using --parameters to set the path to the azuredeploy.parameters.json file. This command deploys the cluster in a resource group you create called myResourceGroup in the West US region.


az login

az account set --subscription "mySubscriptionID"

az group create --name "myResourceGroup" --location "westus" 

az group deployment create -g "myResourceGroup" --template-uri "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/master/101-acs-kubernetes/azuredeploy.json" --parameters @azuredeploy.parameters.json

Inside your Azure Resource group you will see all the resources that get provisioned within your subscription after deploying that ARM template.

Using Helm to deploy a RabbitMQ Container

In this part we will connect to our ACS Kubernetes cluster and deploy a Rabbit MQ Helm Chart container.

Lets first connect to our newly deployed Azure Container Service pool. Start by installing kubectl.

  C:\Users\naros\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python35\Scripts>az acs kubernetes install-cli

  C:\Users\naros\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python35\Scripts>kubectl get context
  the server doesn't have a resource type "context"

Lets set our kube config file to the appropriate one we just deployed

az acs kubernetes get-credentials --resource-group=RabbitMQ-ACS --name=containerservice-RabbitMQ-ACS

If you run into an Authentication failed issue, open bash and navigate to the root file of your master in the pool. Grab the config file and copy it to your local device.


nmrose@MININT-IQPVRH0:~/.ssh$ ssh -i id_rsa azureuser@rabbitmqacsmgmt.westus.cloudapp.azure.com
Enter passphrase for key 'id_rsa':

azureuser@k8s-master-CAAF9CF0-0:~$ cd .kube
azureuser@k8s-master-CAAF9CF0-0:~/.kube$ ls

scp azureuser@rabbitmqacsmgmt.westus.cloudapp.azure.com:/home/azureuser/.kube/config ~/.kube/config

Once completed run `kubectl cluster-info’ and you will see details of your kubernetes cluster.

Kubernetes master is running at https://rabbitmqacsmgmt.westus.cloudapp.azure.com
Heapster is running at https://rabbitmqacsmgmt.westus.cloudapp.azure.com/api/v1/proxy/namespaces/kube-system/services/heapster
KubeDNS is running at https://rabbitmqacsmgmt.westus.cloudapp.azure.com/api/v1/proxy/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns
kubernetes-dashboard is running at https://rabbitmqacsmgmt.westus.cloudapp.azure.com/api/v1/proxy/namespaces/kube-system/services/kubernetes-dashboard

Lets first deploy a simg Nginx server to the pool.

kubectl get nodes
kubectl.exe run nginx --image nginx --port=80

It will take a few moments to have the nginx pod ready. Once ready use kubectl get pods to get the status.

Now lets use helm to deploy a RabbitMQ container. Helm is a tool for managing Kubernetes charts. Charts are packages of pre-configured Kubernetes resources.

First we need to get the Helm libraries. Then lets use the default rabbitMQ chart for this example.

helm init

helm installstable/rabbitmq

You will receive an output similar to the one below:

NAME:   cold-fly
LAST DEPLOYED: Thu Apr 13 15:06:35 2017
NAMESPACE: default
STATUS: DEPLOYED

RESOURCES:
==> v1/Secret
NAME               TYPE    DATA  AGE
cold-fly-rabbitmq  Opaque  2     0s

==> v1/PersistentVolumeClaim
NAME               STATUS   VOLUME                                    CAPACITY  ACCESSMODES  AGE
cold-fly-rabbitmq  Pending  pvc-762dc4c0-2095-11e7-bd2d-000d3a31f22b  0         0s

==> v1/Service
NAME               CLUSTER-IP    EXTERNAL-IP  PORT(S)                                AGE
cold-fly-rabbitmq  10.0.119.105  <none>       4369/TCP,5672/TCP,25672/TCP,15672/TCP  0s

==> extensions/v1beta1/Deployment
NAME               DESIRED  CURRENT  UP-TO-DATE  AVAILABLE  AGE
cold-fly-rabbitmq  1        1        1           0          0s


NOTES:

** P.S. RabbitMQ may take a few minutes to become available. Please be patient. **

The RabbitMQ AMQP port 5672 can be accessed on the following DNS name from within your cluster: cold-fly-rabbitmq.default.svc.cluster.local

  echo Username      : user
  echo Password      : $(kubectl get secret --namespace default cold-fly-rabbitmq -o jsonpath="{.data.rabbitmq-password}" | base64 --decode)
  echo ErLang Cookie : $(kubectl get secret --namespace default cold-fly-rabbitmq -o jsonpath="{.data.rabbitmq-erlang-cookie}" | base64 --decode)

To Access the RabbitMQ Management interface:

  export POD_NAME=$(kubectl get pods --namespace default -l "app=cold-fly-rabbitmq" -o jsonpath="{.items[0].metadata.name}")
  echo URL : http://127.0.0.1:15672
  kubectl port-forward $POD_NAME 15672:15672

Switch over to bash and install kubectl using the following command:

curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/$(curl -s https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/stable.txt)/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl

Run the echo commands to attain your Username, Password and ErLang Cookie. You may need to at a ./ before kubectl if it was not added as an environment variable. Here is an example:

echo ErLang Cookie : $(kubectl get secret --namespace default cold-fly-rabbitmq -o jsonpath="{.data.rabbitmq-erlang-cookie}" | base64 --decode)

Exit out of bash.

We are still unable to connect to our service because the ip address have not been exposed through the load balancer.

To configure the load balancer to accept external traffic to the deployment, run kubectl edit svc to configure the service to run through the load balancer.

A text editor window will open displaying the YAML file for your services.

For the Rabbitmq app change the network type to LoadBalancer under sessionAffinity.

   app: cold-fly-rabbitmq
   sessionAffinity: None
   type: LoadBalancer

Once the YAML has been edited run kubectl get svc to check the status of your rabbitmq app’s external-ip address as it gets provisioned.

C:\Users\naros\Documents\GitHub\RabbitMQ-Kubernetes-in-Azure-Container-Services>kubectl get svc
NAME                CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)                                                         AGE
cold-fly-rabbitmq   10.0.119.105   <pending>     4369:30350/TCP,5672:30971/TCP,25672:32275/TCP,15672:30537/TCP   1d
kubernetes          10.0.0.1       <none>        443/TCP                                                         2d

Once it has been completed, navigate to the <External-IP>:15672 in your browser. Enter your credentials that you recorded earlier from Bash in the RabbitMQ Management Portal.