This document outlines some of the configuration options that are supported by the OpenWhisk Helm chart. In general, you customize your deployment by adding stanzas to mycluster.yaml that override default values in the helm/values.yaml file.

Deploying Event Providers

OpenWhisk has several standard Event Providers that can be optionally enabled. The OpenWhisk Helm Chart currently includes optional support for deploying the alarm, cloudant, and kafka providers. To deploy a provider, you must add a stanza to your mycluster.yaml that enables it, for example:

providers:
  alarm:
    enabled: true

The deployment of the event providers is not enabled by default because they are not fully functional with OpenWhisk's default DockerContainerFactory without additional configuration (the issue is that user action containers created by the DockerContainerFactory are not configured to themselves be able to invoke Kubernetes services). To work around this you must do one of the following three alternatives:

1. Deploy a CouchDB instance external to your Kubernetes cluster and configure the event provider(s) to use it by adding stanzas like the following to your mycluster.yaml:

providers:
  alarm:
    db:
      external: true
      prefix: "alm"
      host: "0.0.0.0"
      port: 5984
      protocol: "http"
      username: "admin"
      password: "secret"

2. Configure the DNS lookup for the user containers created by DockerContainerFactory to use Kubernetes's DNS service. For example, if your cluster uses kube-dns, then first get the IP address of Kubernetes DNS server by echo $(kubectl get svc kube-dns -n kube-system -o 'jsonpath={.spec.clusterIP}') and then add below stanza to your mycluster.yaml:

invoker:
  kubeDNS: "<IP_Address_Of_Kube_DNS>"

3. Use the lower performance KubernetesContainerFactory by adding the following stanza to your mycluster.yaml

invoker:
  containerFactory:
    impl: "kubernetes"

Replication factor

By default the OpenWhisk Helm Chart will deploy a single replica of each of the micro-services that make up the OpenWhisk control plane. By changing the replicaCount value for a service, you can instead deploy multiple instances. This can support both increased scalability and fault tolerance. For example, to deploy two controller instances, add the following to your mycluster.yaml

controller:
  replicaCount: 2

NOTE: The Helm-based deployment does not yet support setting the replicaCount to be greater than 1 for the following components:

• apigateway
• couchdb
• kakfa
• kakfaprovider
• nginx
• redis We are actively working on reducing this list and would welcome PRs to help.

Using an external database

You may want to use an external CouchDB or Cloudant instance instead of deploying a CouchDB instance as a Kubernetes pod. You can do this by adding a stanza like the one below to your mycluster.yaml, substituting in the appropriate values for <...>

db:
  external: true
  host: <db hostname or ip addr>
  port: <db port>
  protocol: <"http" or "https">
  auth:
    username: <username>
    password: <password>

If your external database has already been initialized for use by OpenWhisk, you can disable the Kubernetes Job that wipes and re-initializes the database by adding the following to your mycluster.yaml

db:
  wipeAndInit: false

Using external Kafka and Zookeeper services

You may want to use an external Zookeeper or Kafka service. To disable the kafka and/or zookeeper with this chart, add a stanza like the one below to your mycluster.yaml.

kafka:
  external: true
zookeeper:
  external: true

To add the hostname of a pre-existing kafka and/or zookeeper, define it in mycluster.yml like this

kafka:
  external: true
  name: < existing kafka service >
zookeeper:
  external: true
  name: < existing zookeeper service >

Optionally, if including this chart as a dependency of another chart where kafka and zookeeper services are already defined, disable this chart's kafka and zookeeper as shown above, and then define kafka_host, zookeeper_connect, and zookeeper_zero_host in your parent chart _helpers.tpl. e.g.

{{/* hostname for kafka */}}
{{- define "kafka_host" -}}
{{ template "kafka.serviceName" . }}
{{- end -}}

{{/* hostname for zookeeper */}}
{{- define "zookeeper_connect" -}}
{{ template "zookeeper.serviceName" . }}
{{- end -}}

{{/* zookeeper_zero_host required by openwhisk readiness check */}}
{{- define "zookeeper_zero_host" -}}
{{ template "zookeeper.serviceName" . }}
{{- end -}}

Persistence

Several of the OpenWhisk components that are deployed by the Helm chart utilize PersistentVolumes to store their data. This enables that data to survive failures/restarts of those components without a complete loss of application state. To support this, the couchdb, zookeeper, kafka, and redis deployments all generate PersistentVolumeClaims that must be satisfied to enable their pods to be scheduled. If your Kubernetes cluster is properly configured to support Dynamic Volume Provision, including having a DefaultStorageClass admission controller and a designated default StorageClass, then this will all happen seamlessly.

If your cluster is not properly configured, then you will need to manually create the necessary PersistentVolumes when deploying the Helm chart. In this case, you should also disable the use of dynamic provisioning by the Helm chart by adding the following stanza to your mycluster.yaml

k8s:
  persistence:
    useDynamicProvisioning: false

You may disable persistence entirely by adding the following stanza to your mycluster.yaml:

k8s:
  persistence:
    enabled: false

Invoker Container Factory

The Invoker is responsible for creating and managing the containers that OpenWhisk creates to execute the user defined functions. A key function of the Invoker is to manage a cache of available warm containers to minimize cold starts of user functions. Architecturally, we support two options for deploying the Invoker component on Kubernetes (selected by picking a ContainerFactoryProviderSPI for your deployment).

1. DockerContainerFactory matches the architecture used by the non-Kubernetes deployments of OpenWhisk. In this approach, an Invoker instance runs on every Kubernetes worker node that is being used to execute user functions. The Invoker directly communicates with the docker daemon running on the worker node to create and manage the user function containers. The primary advantages of this configuration are lower latency on container management operations and robustness of the code paths being used (since they are the same as in the default system). The primary disadvantage is that it does not leverage Kubernetes to simplify resource management, security configuration, etc. for user containers.
2. KubernetesContainerFactory is a truly Kubernetes-native design where although the Invoker is still responsible for managing the cache of available user containers, the Invoker relies on Kubernetes to create, schedule, and manage the Pods that contain the user function containers. The pros and cons of this design are roughly the inverse of DockerContainerFactory. Kubernetes pod management operations have higher latency and exercise newer code paths in the Invoker. However, this design fully leverages Kubernetes to manage the execution resources for user functions.

You can control the selection of the ContainerFactory by adding either

invoker:
  containerFactory:
    impl: "docker"

or

invoker:
  containerFactory:
    impl: "kubernetes"

to your mycluster.yaml

The KubernetesContainerFactory can be deployed with an additional invokerAgent that implements container suspend/resume operations on behalf of a remote Invoker. To enable this, add

invoker:
  containerFactory:
    impl: "kubernetes"
      agent:
        enabled: true

to your mycluster.yaml

For scalability, you will probably want to use replicaCount to deploy more than one Invoker when using the KubernetesContainerFactory. You will also need to override the value of whisk.containerPool.userMemory to a significantly larger value when using the KubernetesContainerFactory to better match the overall memory available on invoker worker nodes divided by the number of Invokers you are creating.