Kubernetes Ri Rke2-Sles Color en
Kubernetes Ri Rke2-Sles Color en
Introductory Deployment
of Rancher Kubernetes
Engine Government
Introductory Deployment of Rancher Kubernetes Engine Government: Refer-
ence Implementation
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3, Rancher Kubernetes Engine Government 1.20.14
SUSE LLC
1800 South Novell Place
Provo, UT 84606
USA
https://documentation.suse.com
Contents
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Motivation 1
1.2 Scope 2
1.3 Audience 2
2 Business aspect 3
2.1 Business problem 3
3 Architectural overview 6
3.1 Solution architecture 6
4 Component model 8
4.1 Component overview 8
5 Deployment 13
5.1 Deployment overview 13
7 References 24
8 Glossary 26
9 Appendix 29
9.1 Compute platform bill of materials 29
10 Legal Notice 32
On the digital transformation journey to a full cloud-native landscape, the use of microservices
becomes the main approach with the dominant technology for such container orchestration be-
ing Kubernetes.1 With its large community of developers and abundant features and capabili-
ties, Kubernetes has become the de-facto standard and is included across most container-as-a-
service platforms. With all of these technologies in place, both developer and operation teams
can effectively deploy, manage and deliver functionality to their end users in a resilient and
agile manner.
1.1 Motivation
Once on such a digital transformation journey, also relevant to focus on areas like:
Workload(s)
Determine how to manage and launch internally developed containerized, microservice
workloads
Kubernetes
As developers and organizations continue their journey from simple, containerized mi-
croservices toward having these workloads orchestrated and deployed where ever they
need, being able to install, monitor and use such Kubernetes infrastructures is a core need.
Such deployments, being Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF2) conformant and
certified3 are essential for both development and production workloads.
With core focus on security and compliance, Rancher Kubernetes Engine Government
inherits close alignment with upstream Kubernetes and provide usability, ease-of-
operations, and deployment model for core use cases.
Compute Platform(s)
To optimize availability, performance, scalability and integrity, assess current system or
hosting platforms
1 https://kubernetes.io/
2 https://www.cncf.io/
3 https://www.cncf.io/certification/software-conformance
1.3 Audience
This document is intended for IT decision makers, architects, system administrators and tech-
nicians who are implementing a flexible, software-defined Kubernetes platform. One should
still be familiar with the traditional IT infrastructure pillars — networking, computing and stor-
age — along with the local use cases for sizing, scaling and limitations within each pillars' en-
vironments.
Cluster Operations
Improved Production and DevOps efficiencies with simplified cluster usage and robust
operations
However, simply relying on upstream Kubernetes alone can introduce extra overhead and risk
because Kubernetes clusters are typically deployed:
Developers
For those who focus on writing code to build their apps securely using a preferred work-
flow, providing a simple, push-button deployment mechanism of their containerized work-
loads where needed.
IT Operators
General infrastructure requirements still rely upon traditional IT pillars are for the stacked,
underlying infrastructure. Ease of deployment, availability, scalability, resiliency, perfor-
mance, security and integrity are still core concerns to be addressed for administrative
control and observability.
Developers
SUSE Rancher makes it easy to securely deploy containerized applications no matter where
the Kubernetes infrastructure runs -– in the cloud, on-premises, or at the edge. Using Helm
or the App Catalog to deploy and manage applications across any or all these environments,
ensuring multi-cluster consistency with a single deployment process.
IT Operators
Kubernetes cluster
API server
api
Cloud controller
c-m
c-m c-c-m manager
c-c-m
c-m c-c-m (optional) c-c-m
Controller
manager c-m
etcd
api
Node Node (persistence store)
api Node etcd
api
kubelet
kubelet
sched
sched
sched
Scheduler
sched
Node
A Kubernetes cluster consists of a set of nodes machines, called workers or agents, that host and
run containerized applications in Pods. Every cluster has at least one worker node. The control
plane manages the worker nodes and the Pods in the cluster. The provider API is a generic
element that allows external interaction with the Kubernetes cluster.
kube-apiserver
The API server is a component of the Kubernetes control plane that exposes the
Kubernetes API
etcd
kube-scheduler
Control plane component that watches for newly created Pods with no assigned
node, and selects a node for them to run on.
kube-controller-manager
Node Components
Node components run on every node, maintaining running pods and providing the Kuber-
netes runtime environment.
kubelet
An agent that runs on each node in the cluster. It makes sure that containers
are running in a Pod.
kube-proxy
A network proxy that runs on each node in your cluster, implementing part of
the Kubernetes Service concept.
While all Rancher Kubernetes Engine Government roles can be installed on a single system,
for the best availability, performance and security, the recommended deployment of a Rancher
Kubernetes Engine Government cluster is a pair of nodes for the control plane role, at least three
etcd role-based nodes and three or more worker nodes.
Note
Regardless of the deployment instance, Rancher Kubernetes Engine Government could
always be deployed by SUSE Rancher or imported as a managed, downstream cluster.
This section describes the various components being used to create a Rancher Kubernetes Engine
Government solution deployment, in the perspective of top to bottom ordering. When complet-
ed, the Rancher Kubernetes Engine Government instance can be used as the application infra-
structure for cloud-native workloads and can be imported into SUSE Rancher for management.
Compute Platform
you can create the necessary infrastructure and services. Further details for these components
are described in the following sections.
launches control plane components as static pods, managed by the kubelet. The embedded
container runtime is containerd.
provides defaults and configuration options that allow clusters to pass the CIS Kubernetes
Benchmark v1.5 or v1.6 with minimal operator intervention
regularly scans components for CVEs using trivy in our build pipeline
With Rancher Kubernetes Engine Government we take lessons learned from developing and
maintaining our lightweight Kubernetes distribution, K3s, and apply them to build an enter-
prise-ready distribution with K3s ease-of-use. What this means is that Rancher Kubernetes En-
gine Government is, at its simplest, a single binary to be installed and configured on all nodes
expected to participate in the Kubernetes cluster. When started, Rancher Kubernetes Engine
Government is then able to bootstrap and supervise role-appropriate agents per node while
sourcing needed content from the network.
The fundamental roles for the nodes and core functionality of Rancher Kubernetes Engine Gov-
ernment are represented in the following figure:
Rancher Kubernetes Engine Government brings together several open source technologies to
make this all work:
Kubernetes
API Server
Controller Manager
Kubelet
Scheduler
Proxy
etcd
CoreDNS
Metrics Server
Helm
All of these, except the NGINX Ingress Controller, are compiled and statically linked with 1
While all Rancher Kubernetes Engine Government roles can be installed on a single system,
for the best availability, performance and security, the recommended deployment of a Rancher
Kubernetes Engine Government cluster is a pair of nodes for the control plane role, at least three
etcd role-based nodes and three or more worker nodes.
Rancher Kubernetes Engine Government can run as a complete cluster on a single node or can
be expanded into a multi-node cluster. Besides the core Kubernetes components, these are also
configurable and included:
All of these components are configurable and can be swapped out for your implementation of
choice. With these included components, you get a fully functional and CNCF-conformant cluster
so you can start running apps right away.
Tip
Learn more information about Rancher Kubernetes Engine Government at https://doc-
s.rke2.io/ .
While all Rancher Kubernetes Engine Government roles can be installed on a single system, a
multi-node cluster, is a more production-like approach and will be described in the deployment
section.
1 https://github.com/golang/go/tree/dev.boringcrypto/misc/boring
Tip
Certified systems and hypervisors can be verified via SUSE YES Certified Bulletins (https://
www.suse.com/yessearch/) and then can be leveraged as supported nodes for this de-
ployment, as long as the certification refers to the respective version of the underlying
SUSE operating system required.
This section describes the process steps for the deployment of the Rancher Kubernetes Engine
Government solution. It describes the process steps to deploy each of the component layers start-
ing as a base functional proof-of-concept, having considerations on migration toward production,
providing scaling guidance that is needed to create the solution.
and details are covered for each layer in the following sections.
Note
The following section’s content is ordered and described from the bottom layer up to the
top.
Validate the necessary CPU, memory, disk capacity, and network interconnect quan-
tity and type are present for each node and its intended role. Refer to the recom-
mended CPU/Memory/Disk/Networking requirements as noted in the Rancher Kuber-
netes Engine Government Hardware Requirements (https://docs.rke2.io/install/require-
ments/) .
Further suggestions
Disk : Use a pair of local, direct attached, mirrored disk drives is present on
each node (SSDs are preferred); these will become the target for the operating
system installation.
Boot Settings : BIOS/uEFI reset to defaults for a known baseline, consistent state
or perhaps with desired, localized values.
Preparation(s)
To meet the solution stack prerequisites and requirements, SUSE operating system offer-
ings, like SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (https://www.suse.com/products/server/) can be
used.
Note
During the node’s installation, it can be pointed to the respective
update service. This can also be accomplished post-installation with
the command line tool named SUSEConnect (https://www.suse.com/
support/kb/doc/?id=000018564) .
Deployment Process
On the compute platform node, install the noted SUSE operating system, by following
these steps:
2. The installation process is described and can be performed with default values by fol-
lowing steps from the product documentation, see Installation Quick Start (https://doc-
umentation.suse.com/sles/15-SP3/single-html/SLES-installation/#article-installation)
Tip
Adjust both the password and the local network addressing setup to comply
with local environment guidelines and requirements.
Deployment Consideration(s)
To further optimize deployment factors, leverage the following practices:
Automation
1. Identify the appropriate, desired version of the Rancher Kubernetes Engine Govern-
ment (for example vX.YY.ZZ+rke2rV) by reviewing
2. For Rancher Kubernetes Engine Government versions 1.21 and higher, if the host
kernel supports AppArmor, the AppArmor tools (usually available via the "appar-
mor-parser" package) must also be present prior to installing Rancher Kubernetes
Engine Government.
On the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server node, install this required package
Deployment Process
Perform the following steps to install the rst Rancher Kubernetes Engine Government
server on one of the nodes to be used for the Kubernetes control plane
1. Set the following variable with the noted version of Rancher Kubernetes Engine Gov-
ernment, as found during the preparation steps.
RKE2_VERSION=""
Set the following variable with the URL that will be used to access the SUSE
Rancher server. This may be based on one or more DNS entries, a reverse-proxy
server, or a load balancer:
RKE2_subjectAltName=
mkdir -p /etc/rancher/rke2/
cat <<EOF> /etc/rancher/rke2/config.yaml
write-kubeconfig-mode: "0644"
tls-san:
- "${RKE2_subjectAltName}"
EOF
3. Start and enable the RKE2 service, which will begin installing the required Kuber-
netes components:
export KUBECONFIG=/etc/rancher/rke2/rke2.yaml
watch -c "kubectl get deployments -A"
Note
For the rst two to three minutes of the installation, the initial output will
include the error phrase "The connection to the server 127.0.0.1:6443
was refused - did you specify the right host or port?". As Kubernetes ser-
vices get started this will be replace with "No resources found". About
Use Ctrl+c to exit the watch loop after all deployment pods are
running
Deployment Consideration(s)
To further optimize deployment factors, leverage the following practices:
Availability
1. Deploy the same operating system on the new compute platform nodes
2. Log in to the rst server node and create a new config.yaml le for the
remaining two server nodes:
Tip
The next steps require using SCP and SSH. Setting up pass-
wordless SSH, and/or using ssh-agent , from the rst serv-
er node to the second and third nodes will make these steps
quicker and easier.
Copy the new config.yaml le to the remaining two server nodes:
Move the config.yaml le to the correct location in the le system:
Monitor the progress of the new server nodes joining the Rancher
Kubernetes Engine Government cluster: watch -c "kubectl get
nodes"
Use Ctrl+c to exit the watch loop after all deployment pods
are running
Note
This can be changed to the normal Kubernetes default
by adding a taint to each server node. See the official
Kubernetes documentation for more information on how
to do that.
3. (Optional) In cases where agent nodes are desired, execute the following
sets of commands, using the same, "RKE2_VERSION", "FIRST_SERVER_IP"
and "NODE_TOKEN" variable settings as above, on each of the agent nodes
to add it to the Rancher Kubernetes Engine Government cluster:
After this successful deployment of the Rancher Kubernetes Engine Government solution, review
the product documentation (https://docs.rke2.io/) for details on how to directly use this Ku-
bernetes cluster. Furthermore, by reviewing the SUSE Rancher product documentation (https://
rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.5/en/) this solution can also be:
Simplify
Simplify and optimize your existing IT environments
Using Rancher Kubernetes Engine Government enables you to simplify, maintain and
scale Kubernetes cluster deployments in a supportable fashion, with a primary focus
on security aspects as well.
Modernize
Bring applications and data into modern computing
Accelerate
Accelerate business transformation through the power of open source software
Given the open source nature of Rancher Kubernetes Engine Government and the un-
derlying software components, you can simplify deployment with automation, main-
tain secure production instance and make significant IT savings as you scale orches-
trated microservice deployments anywhere you need to and for whatever use cases
are needed, in an agile and innovative way.
BOOKS
TRAINING
SUSE - https://training.suse.com/
Rancher - https://rancher.com/training/
WEB SITES
SUSE - https://www.suse.com
Products
Projects
Reference Implementation
A guide with the basic steps to deploy the highlighted components of the SUSE port-
folio, including generalized pointers to other layers and elements. This is considered
an introductory approach and a basis for other tested variations.
1
Reference Architectures
A guide with the general steps to deploy and validate the structured solution compo-
nents from both the SUSE and partner portfolios. This provides a shareable template
of consistency for consumers to leverage for similar production ready solutions, in-
cluding design considerations, implementation suggestions and best practices.
Best Practice
Information that can overlap both the SUSE and partner space. It can either be pro-
vided as a stand-alone guide that provides reliable technical information not covered
in other product documentation, based on real-life installation and implementation
experiences from subject matter experts or complementary, embedded sections with-
in any of the above documentation types describing considerations and possible steps
forward.
Factor(s)
2
Automation
Infrastructure automation enables speed through faster execution when configuring
the infrastructure and aims at providing visibility to help other teams across the en-
terprise work quickly and more efficiently. Automation removes the risk associated
with human error, like manual misconfiguration; removing this can decrease down-
time and increase reliability. These outcomes and attributes help the enterprise move
toward implementing a culture of DevOps, the combined working of development
and operations.
3
Availability
Preventing or reducing the likelihood and frequency of failures via design de-
cisions within the allowed cost of ownership
4
Integrity
Integrity is the maintenance of, and the insurance of the accuracy and consistency of
a specific element over its entire lifecycle. Both physical and logical aspects must be
managed to ensure stability, performance, re-usability and maintainability.
5
Security
Security is about ensuring freedom from or resilience against potential harm, includ-
ing protection from destructive or hostile forces. To minimize risks, one mus manage
governance to avoid tampering, maintain access controls to prevent unauthorized
usage and integrate layers of defense, reporting and recovery tactics.
Deployment Flavor(s)
6
Proof-of-Concept
A partial or nearly complete prototype constructed to demonstrate functionality and
feasibility for verifying specific aspects or concepts under consideration. This is often
a starting point when evaluating a new, transitional technology. Sometimes it starts
as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP7) that has just enough features to satisfy an
initial set of requests. After such insights and feedback are obtained and potentially
addressed, redeployments may be used to iteratively branch into other realms or to
incorporate other known working functionality.
Scaling
The flexibility of a system environment to either vertically scale-up, horizontally
scale-out or conversely scale-down by adding or subtracting resources as needed. At-
tributes like capacity and performance are often the primary requirements to address,
while still maintaining functional consistency and reliability.
The following sections provide a bill of materials listing for the respective component layer(s)
of the described deployment.
Industry Standard
Server
1 Year
1 Year
Note
For the software components, other support term durations are also available.
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston,
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