Installing XOS

This section described how to deploy XOS. It is a minimal deployment that includes the set of micro-services that make up XOS itself, plus optionally, an example service (a web server running in a Kubernetes pod). For an example of how XOS is integrated into a larger system, see the CORD Installation Guide.

XOS runs on any version of Kubernetes (1.10 or greater), and uses the Helm client-side tool. If you are new to Kubernetes, we recommend this tutorial as a good place to start.

Although you are free to set up Kubernetes and Helm in whatever way makes sense to you, the following walks through an example installation sequence on MacOS. It was tested on version 10.12.6.

Prerequisites

You need to install Docker. Visit https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/install/ for instructions.

You also need to install VirtualBox. Visit https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads for instructions.

The following assumes you've installed the Homebrew package manager. Visit https://brew.sh/ for instructions.

Install Minikube and Kubectl

To install Minikube, run the following command:

curl -Lo minikube https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/v0.28.0/minikube-darwin-amd64 && chmod +x minikube && sudo mv minikube /usr/local/bin/

To install Kubectl, run the following command:

brew install kubectl

Install Helm and Tiller

The following installs both Helm and Tiller.

brew install kubernetes-helm

Bring Up a Kubernetes Cluster

Start a minikube cluster as follows. This automatically runs inside VirtualBox.

minikube start

To see that it's running, type

kubectl cluster-info

You should see something like the following

Kubernetes master is running at https://192.168.99.100:8443
KubeDNS is running at https://192.168.99.100:8443/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns:dn s/proxy

To further debug and diagnose cluster problems, use 'kubectl cluster-info dump'.

You can also see how the cluster is configured by looking at ~/.kube/config. Other tools described on this page use this configuration file to find your cluster.

If you want, you can see minikube running by looking at the VirtualBox dashboard. Or alternatively, you can visit the Minikube dashboard:

minikube dashboard

As a final setp, you need to start Tiller on the Kubernetes cluster.

helm init

Download XOS Helm-Charts

The helm charts used to deploy XOS are currently bundled in the CORD helm-chart repository. The rest of this section assumes all you download this repository into directory $SRC_DIR.

mkdir $SRC_DIR
cd $SRC_DIR
git clone https://gerrit.opencord.org/helm-charts
cd helm-charts

While downloading the simple helm-charts repository is sufficient for bringing up XOS, you may also want to download the XOS source code, for example, so you can walk through the XOS tutorial. The easiest way to do this uses the repo tool, as described here.

Bring Up XOS

To deploy xos-core (plus affiliated micro-services) into your Kubernetes cluster, execute the following from the $SRC_DIR/helm-charts directory:

helm dep update xos-core 
helm install xos-core -n xos-core

You also need to start the Kafka message bus to catch event notifications send by the various components:

helm repo add incubator http://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-charts-incubator 
helm install -f examples/kafka-single.yaml --version 0.8.8 -n cord-kafka incubator/kafka

Use kubectl get pods to verify that all containers that implement XOS (and Kafka) are successfully running. You should see output that looks something like this:

NAME                             READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE 
cord-kafka-0                     1/1       Running   0          3m  
cord-kafka-zookeeper-0           1/1       Running   0          3m  
xos-chameleon-58c5b847d6-48jvf   1/1       Running   0          11m 
xos-core-7dc45f677b-pzhm6        1/1       Running   0          11m 
xos-db-c49549b7f-mzs4n           1/1       Running   0          11m 
xos-gui-7c96669d8c-8zkhq         1/1       Running   0          11m 
xos-tosca-7f6cf85657-gzddq       1/1       Running   0          11m 
xos-ws-5f47ff7d94-xg9f5          1/1       Running   0          11m

Bring Up Monitoring and Logging

Although not required, we recommend that you also bring up two auxilary services to capture and display monitoring and logging information. This is done by executing the following Helm charts.

Monitoring (once running, access Grafana Dashboard at port 31300):

helm dep update nem-monitoring 
helm install -n nem-monitoring nem-monitoring

Logging (once running, access Kibana Dashboard at port 30601):

helm dep up logging 
helm install -f examples/logging-single.yaml -n logging logging

Note: The -f examples/logging-single.yaml option says to not use persistent storage, which is fine for development or demo purposes, but not for operational deployments.

Bring Up a Service

Optionally, you can bring up a simple service to be managed by XOS. This involves deploying two additional helm charts: base-kubernetes and demo-simpleexampleservice. Again from the $SRC_DIR/helm-charts directory, execute the following:

helm dep update xos-profiles/base-kubernetes 
helm install xos-profiles/base-kubernetes -n base-kubernetes 
helm dep update xos-profiles/demo-simpleexampleservice 
helm install xos-profiles/demo-simpleexampleservice -n demo-simpleexampleservice

When all the containers are successfully up and running, kubectl get pod will return output that looks something like this:

NAME                                           READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE 
base-kubernetes-kubernetes-75d68b65bc-h594m    1/1       Running     0          6m 
base-kubernetes-tosca-loader-ltdzg             0/1       Completed   4          6m 
cord-kafka-0                                   1/1       Running     1          15m 
cord-kafka-zookeeper-0                         1/1       Running     0          15m 
demo-simpleexampleservice-cc8fbfb7-s4r68       1/1       Running     0          5m 
demo-simpleexampleservice-tosca-loader-46qtg   0/1       Completed   4          5m 
xos-chameleon-58c5b847d6-rcqff                 1/1       Running     0          16m 
xos-core-7dc45f677b-27vc9                      1/1       Running     0          16m 
xos-db-c49549b7f-589n6                         1/1       Running     0          16m 
xos-gui-7c96669d8c-gcwsv                       1/1       Running     0          16m 
xos-tosca-7f6cf85657-bf276                     1/1       Running     0          16m 
xos-ws-5f47ff7d94-mpn7g                        1/1       Running     0          16m

The two tosca-loader items with Completed status are jobs, as opposed to pods. Their job is to load TOSCA-based provisioning and configuration information into XOS, and so they run to complettion and then terminate. It is not uncommon to see them in an Error state as they retry while waiting for the corresponding services to come on-line.

Visit XOS Dashboard

Finally, to view the XOS dashboard, run the following:

minikube service xos-gui

This will launch a window in your default browser. Administrator login and password are defined in $SRC_DIR/helm-charts/xos-core/values.yaml.

Next Steps

This completes the installation process. At this point, you can either drill down on the internals of Simple Example Service, or you can work through the XOS tutorial.