Category Archives: Kubernetes

A simple joy of a managed AKS offering in Azure

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A while back we moved to Azure Kubernetes Service for running the Hyperfish service. One of the advertised benefits we liked about AKS was that it was a managed service and that Microsoft would help us keep it in good working order. Late last week the value of this really hit home when I saw the following headline:

Kubernetes’ first major security hole discovered

It’s fair to say this freaked me out (significantly) and I immediately started to look into what we needed to do in order to secure our environments ASAP.

I went digging on twitter and found this very helpful gem from Gabe Monroy:

What a relief! I’m guessing that having people on the team who not only build and run AKS but also work on the Kubernetes project itself meant that Microsoft got the heads up about this vulnrability well before the CVE was published.

This is a fantastic example of why a managed service can help you running your applications with less manual effort. That said a managed service comes with a set of tradeoffs usually around flexilbity and control and so your particular requirments will dictate if you are able to take advantage of one.

Building a start-up on Azure with CI/CD, containers, and Kubernetes, without the explosive ops overhead

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I had a great time speaking at Microsoft’s Ignite conference last week!  It was fun talking a bit about our startup journey at Hyperfish and some of the decisions we made along the way about running and supporting our service.

This was a totally new topic for me and something a bit outside my normal speaking topics … but I really enjoy sharing our journey with others!

You can check out the session recording here:

Using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for your VSTS build agents

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Sometimes hosted build agents in VSTS dont cut the mustard and you want full control over your build environment. That’s where self hosted build agents come in. The problem is … do you don’t want to run VMs ideally and if you are getting into Kubernetes then your dev cluster is probably sitting there idle 90%+ of the time with all those CPU cycles being wasted.

We decided to do something with that extra capacity and run a set of VSTS linux build agents (good for Nodejs and .net Core builds etc…) in our dev AKS cluster! We can scale them up for more concurrent builds really easily.

What you will need:

Lets go …

Helm is a tool that helps you install apps in your kubernetes environment. Helm charts are templates for your application. They define what your app needs and what containers should be deployed etc… Fortunately Microsoft make their linux build agent available as a Docker image that we can use in a helm chart to get it deployed. https://hub.docker.com/r/microsoft/vsts-agent/

This means all we need to do is deploy it (or many of them) to Kubernetes … and helm charts can help with that! We wrote a basic one to get things going.

Setup

First you will need to get our helm chart.

git clone [email protected]:Hyperfish/vsts-build.git

Next open up the values.yaml file and update the following properties:

  • VSTS_ACCOUNT – this is the name of your VSTS account e.g. “contoso”.
  • VSTS_POOL – this is the name of the agent pool you would like your agents registered in.
  • VSTS_TOKEN – this is your personal access token from VSTS that has been given at least the Agent Pools (read, manage) scope.
  • replicaCount – set this to how many agents you want deployed.

Note: for more information about these see the vsts agent docker image documentation.

Deploy

Once you have updated the values.yaml file you are ready to deploy!

Ensure you are in the /vsts-agent folder and have kubectl connected to the kubernetes cluster you want to deploy the application to. (tip: run “kubectl cluster-info” to check you are connected)

Deploy the chart:

helm install .

Once complete the agent will be started in your kubernetes cluster.

helm ls

This will show you the apps you ahve deployed and you should see the vets-agent chart deployed.

Check your VSTS build pool that you specified in the values.yaml file. You should see your new agents listed.

Troubleshooting:
If you don’t see them listed then its likely that the values you set are incorrect. You can check the logs of your agents using:

kubectl logs <pod name>

You might see something like “error: missing VSTS_ACCOUNT environment variable”

Summary

Kubernetes is a great way to deploy multiple vsts build agents! Deploying with a Helm chart is even nicer! It gives you are simple way to deploy and manage your agents in kubernetes.

Enjoy!

-CJ