Pulsar can be easily deployed in Kubernetes clusters, either in managed clusters on Google Container Engine or Amazon Web Services or in custom clusters.
The deployment method shown in this guide relies on YAML definitions for Kubernetes resources. The [kubernetes]({{ site.pulsar_repo }}/kubernetes) subdirectory of the Pulsar package holds resource definitions for:
pulsar-admin CLI toolTo get started, install a source package from the downloads page.
{% include admonition.html type=‘warning’ content=“Please note that the Pulsar binary package will not contain the necessary YAML resources to deploy Pulsar on Kubernetes.” %}
If you'd like to change the number of bookies, brokers, or ZooKeeper nodes in your Pulsar cluster, modify the replicas parameter in the spec section of the appropriate Deployment or StatefulSet resource.
Google Container Engine (GKE) automates the creation and management of Kubernetes clusters in Google Compute Engine (GCE).
To get started, you'll need:
gcloud and kubectl tools).You can create a new GKE cluster using the container clusters create command for gcloud. This command enables you to specify the number of nodes in the cluster, the machine types of those nodes, and more.
As an example, we'll create a new GKE cluster for Kubernetes version 1.6.4 in the us-central1-a zone. The cluster will be named pulsar-gke-cluster and will consist of three VMs, each using two locally attached SSDs and running on n1-standard-8 machines. These SSDs will be used by {% popover bookie %} instances, one for the BookKeeper journal and the other for storing the actual message data.
$ gcloud container clusters create pulsar-gke-cluster \ --zone=us-central1-a \ --machine-type=n1-standard-8 \ --num-nodes=3 \ --local-ssd-count=2 \ --cluster-version=1.6.4
By default, bookies will run on all the machines that have locally attached SSD disks. In this example, all of those machines will have two SSDs, but you can add different types of machines to the cluster later. You can control which machines host bookie servers using labels.
You can observe your cluster in the Kubernetes Dashboard by downloading the credentials for your Kubernetes cluster and opening up a proxy to the cluster:
$ gcloud container clusters get-credentials pulsar-gke-cluster \ --zone=us-central1-a \ --project=your-project-name $ kubectl proxy
By default, the proxy will be opened on port 8001. Now you can navigate to localhost:8001/ui in your browser to access the dashboard. At first your GKE cluster will be empty, but that will change as you begin deploying Pulsar components.
You can run Kubernetes on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in a variety of ways. A very simple way that was recently introduced involves using the Kubernetes Operations (kops) tool.
You can find detailed instructions for setting up a Kubernetes cluster on AWS here.
When you create a cluster using those instructions, your kubectl config in ~/.kube/config (on MacOS and Linux) will be updated for you, so you probably won't need to change your configuration. Nonetheless, you can ensure that kubectl can interact with your cluster by listing the nodes in the cluster:
$ kubectl get nodes
If kubectl is working with your cluster, you can proceed to deploy Pulsar components.
Pulsar can be deployed on a custom, non-GKE Kubernetes cluster as well. You can find detailed documentation on how to choose a Kubernetes installation method that suits your needs in the Picking the Right Solution guide in the Kubernetes docs.
The easiest way to run a Kubernetes cluster is to do so locally. To install a mini local cluster for testing purposes, running in local VMs, you can either:
For the second option, follow the instructions for running Kubernetes using CoreOS on Vagrant. We'll provide an abridged version of those instructions here.
First, make sure you have Vagrant and VirtualBox installed. Then clone the repo and start up the cluster:
$ git clone https://github.com/pires/kubernetes-vagrant-coreos-cluster $ cd kubernetes-vagrant-coreos-cluster # Start a three-VM cluster $ NODES=3 USE_KUBE_UI=true vagrant up
Create SSD disk mount points on the VMs using this script:
$ for vm in node-01 node-02 node-03; do NODES=3 vagrant ssh $vm -c "sudo mkdir -p /mnt/disks/ssd0" NODES=3 vagrant ssh $vm -c "sudo mkdir -p /mnt/disks/ssd1" done
{% popover Bookies %} expect two logical devices to mount for journal and persistent message storage to be available. In this VM exercise, we created two directories on each VM.
Once the cluster is up, you can verify that kubectl can access it:
$ kubectl get nodes NAME STATUS AGE VERSION 172.17.8.101 Ready,SchedulingDisabled 10m v1.6.4 172.17.8.102 Ready 8m v1.6.4 172.17.8.103 Ready 6m v1.6.4 172.17.8.104 Ready 4m v1.6.4
In order to use the Kubernetes Dashboard with your local Kubernetes cluster, first use kubectl to create a proxy to the cluster:
$ kubectl proxy
Now you can access the web interface at localhost:8001/ui. At first your local cluster will be empty, but that will change as you begin deploying Pulsar components.
Now that you've set up a Kubernetes cluster, either on Google Container Engine or on a custom cluster, you can begin deploying the components that make up Pulsar. The YAML resource definitions for Pulsar components can be found in the kubernetes folder of the Pulsar source package.
In that package, there are two sets of resource definitions, one for Google Container Engine (GKE) in the kubernetes/google-container-engine folder and one for a custom Kubernetes cluster in the kubernetes/generic folder. To begin, cd into the appropriate folder.
You must deploy {% popover ZooKeeper %} as the first Pulsar component, as it is a dependency for the others.
$ kubectl apply -f zookeeper.yaml
Wait until all three ZooKeeper server pods are up and have the status Running. You can check on the status of the ZooKeeper pods at any time:
$ kubectl get pods -l component=zookeeper NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE zk-0 1/1 Running 0 18m zk-1 1/1 Running 0 17m zk-2 0/1 Running 6 15m
This step may take several minutes, as Kubernetes needs to download the Docker image on the VMs.
Once ZooKeeper is running, you need to initialize the metadata for the Pulsar cluster in ZooKeeper. This includes system metadata for {% popover BookKeeper %} and Pulsar more broadly.
$ kubectl exec -it zk-0 -- \ bin/pulsar initialize-cluster-metadata \ --cluster us-central \ --zookeeper zookeeper \ --global-zookeeper zookeeper \ --web-service-url http://broker.default.svc.cluster.local:8080/ \ --broker-service-url pulsar://broker.default.svc.cluster.local:6650/
Make sure to modify the metadata values for your own cluster when necessary.
Once cluster metadata has been successfully initialized, you can then deploy the {% popover bookies %}, {% popover brokers %}, and monitoring stack (Prometheus, Grafana, and the Pulsar dashboard).
$ kubectl apply -f bookie.yaml $ kubectl apply -f broker.yaml $ kubectl apply -f monitoring.yaml
You can check on the status of the pods for these components either in the Kubernetes Dashboard or using kubectl:
$ kubectl get pods
Once all of the components are up and running, you'll need to create at least one Pulsar {% popover property %} and at least one {% popover namespace %}.
{% include admonition.html type=‘info’ content=' This step is not strictly required if Pulsar authentication and authorization is turned on, though it allows you to change policies for each of the namespaces later. ' %}
To create properties and namespaces, connect to the pulsar-admin pod that has already been configured to act as a client for your newly created Pulsar cluster.
$ kubectl exec pulsar-admin -it -- bash
From there, you can issue all admin commands. Here's an example command that would create a property named prop and a namespace within that property named prop/us-central/ns.
export MY_PROPERTY=prop export MY_NAMESPACE=prop/us-central/ns # Provision a new Pulsar property $ bin/pulsar-admin properties create $MY_PROPERTY \ --admin-roles admin \ --allowed-clusters us-central # Create a namespace that can be spread across up to 16 brokers $ bin/pulsar-admin namespaces create $MY_NAMESPACE --bundles 16
Now that a property and namespace have been created, you can begin experimenting with your running Pulsar cluster. From the same pulsar-admin pod, for example, you can use pulsar-perf to create a test {% popover producer %} to publish 10,000 messages a second on a topic in the {% popover property %} and {% popover namespace %} you created:
$ bin/pulsar-perf produce persistent://prop/us-central/ns/my-topic \ --rate 10000
Similarly, you can start a {% popover consumer %} to subscribe to and receive all the messages on that topic:
$ bin/pulsar-perf consume persistent://prop/us-central/ns/my-topic \ --subscriber-name my-subscription-name
You can also view stats for the topic using the pulsar-admin tool:
$ bin/pulsar-admin persistent stats persistent://prop/us-central/ns/my-topic
The default monitoring stack for Pulsar on Kubernetes has consists of Prometheus, Grafana, and the Pulsar dashbaord.
All Pulsar metrics in Kubernetes are collected by a Prometheus instance running inside the cluster. Typically, there is no need to access Prometheus directly. Instead, you can use the Grafana interface that displays the data stored in Prometheus.
In your Kubernetes cluster, you can use Grafana to view dashbaords for Pulsar {% popover namespaces %} (message rates, latency, and storage), JVM stats, {% popover ZooKeeper %}, and {% popover BookKeeper %}. You can get access to the pod serving Grafana using kubectl's port-forward command:
$ kubectl port-forward $(kubectl get pods | grep grafana | awk '{print $1}') 3000
You can then access the dashboard in your web browser at localhost:3000.
While Grafana and Prometheus are used to provide graphs with historical data, Pulsar dashboard reports more detailed current data for individual {% popover topics %}.
For example, you can have sortable tables showing all namespaces, topics, and broker stats, with details on the IP address for consumers, how long they've been connected, and much more.
You can access to the pod serving the Pulsar dashboard using kubectl's port-forward command:
$ kubectl port-forward $(kubectl get pods | grep pulsar-dashboard | awk '{print $1}') 8080:80
You can then access the dashboard in your web browser at localhost:8080.