typhoon/docs/concepts.md

Concepts

Let's cover the concepts you'll need to get started.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source cluster system for deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications across a pool of compute nodes (bare-metal, droplets, instances).

Nodes

Cluster nodes provision themselves from a declarative configuration upfront. Nodes run a kubelet service and register themselves with the control plane to join the higher order cluster. All nodes run kube-proxy and calico or flannel pods.

Controllers

Controller nodes are scheduled to run the Kubernetes apiserver, scheduler, controller-manager, kube-dns, and kube-proxy. A fully qualified domain name (e.g. cluster_name.domain.com) resolving to a network load balancer or round-robin DNS (depends on platform) is used to refer to the control plane.

Workers

Worker nodes register with the control plane and run application workloads.

Terraform

Terraform config files declare resources that Terraform should manage. Resources include infrastructure components created through a provider API (e.g. Compute instances, DNS records) or local assets like TLS certificates and config files.

# Declare an instance
resource "google_compute_instance" "pet" {
  # ...
}

The terraform tool parses configs, reconciles the desired state with actual state, and updates resources to reach desired state.

$ terraform plan
Plan: 4 to add, 0 to change, 0 to destroy.
$ terraform apply
Apply complete! Resources: 4 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.

With Typhoon, you'll be able to manage clusters with Terraform.

Modules

Terraform modules allow a collection of resources to be configured and managed together. Typhoon provides a Kubernetes cluster Terraform module for each supported platform and operating system.

Clusters are declared in Terraform by referencing the module.

module "google-cloud-yavin" {
  source = "git::https://github.com/poseidon/typhoon//google-cloud/container-linux/kubernetes"
  cluster_name = "yavin"
  ...
}

Versioning

Modules are updated regularly, set the version to a release tag or commit hash.

...
source = "git:https://github.com/poseidon/typhoon//google-cloud/container-linux/kubernetes?ref=v1.7.7"

Module versioning ensures terraform get --update only fetches the desired version, so plan and apply don't change cluster resources, unless the version is altered.

Organize

Maintain Terraform configs for "live" infrastructure in a versioned repository. Seek to organize configs to reflect resources that should be managed together in a terraform apply invocation.

You may choose to organize resources all together, by team, by project, or some other scheme. Here's an example that manages three clusters together:

.git/
infra/
└── terraform
    └── clusters
        ├── bare-metal-tungsten.tf
        ├── google-cloud-yavin.tf
        ├── digital-ocean-nemo.tf
        ├── providers.tf
        ├── terraform.tfvars
        └── remote-backend.tf

By convention, providers.tf registers provider APIs, terraform.tfvars stores shared values, and state is written to a remote backend.

State

Terraform syncs its state with provider APIs to plan changes to reconcile to the desired state. By default, Terraform writes state data (including secrets!) to a terraform.tfstate file. At a minimum, add a .gitignore file (or equivalent) to prevent state from being committed to your infrastructure repository.

# .gitignore
*.tfstate
*.tfstate.backup
.terraform/

Remote Backend

Later, you may wish to checkout Terraform remote backends which store state in a remote bucket like Google Storage or S3.

terraform {
  backend "gcs" {
    credentials = "/path/to/credentials.json"
    project     = "project-id"
    bucket      = "bucket-id"
    path        = "metal.tfstate"
  }
}