Creating ReplicationController in Kubernetes Cluster using Terraform
Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available.
As a container management tool, Kubernetes was designed to orchestrate multiple containers and replication, and in fact there are currently several ways to do it.
What is Kubernetes replication for?
Before we go into how you would do replication, let’s talk about why. Typically you would want to replicate your containers (and thereby your applications) for several reasons, including:
- Reliability: By having multiple versions of an application, you prevent problems if one or more fails. This is particularly true if the system replaces any containers that fail.
- Load balancing: Having multiple versions of a container enables you to easily send traffic to different instances to prevent overloading of a single instance or node. This is something that Kubernetes does out of the box, making it extremely convenient.
- Scaling: When load does become too much for the number of existing instances, Kubernetes enables you to easily scale up your application, adding additional instances as needed.
Replication is appropriate for numerous use cases, including:
- Microservices-based applications: In these cases, multiple small applications provide very specific functionality.
- Cloud native applications: Because cloud-native applications are based on the theory that any component can fail at any time, replication is a perfect environment for implementing them, as multiple instances are baked into the architecture.
- Mobile applications: Mobile applications can often be architected so that the mobile client interacts with an isolated version of the server application.
ReplicationController
A ReplicationController ensures that a specified number of pod replicas are running at any one time. In other words, a ReplicationController makes sure that a pod or a homogeneous set of pods is always up and available.
How a ReplicationController Works?
If there are too many pods, the ReplicationController terminates the extra pods. If there are too few, the ReplicationController starts more pods. Unlike manually created pods, the pods maintained by a ReplicationController are automatically replaced if they fail, are deleted, or are terminated. For example, your pods are re-created on a node after disruptive maintenance such as a kernel upgrade. For this reason, you should use a ReplicationController even if your application requires only a single pod. A ReplicationController is similar to a process supervisor, but instead of supervising individual processes on a single node, the ReplicationController supervises multiple pods across multiple nodes.
ReplicationController is often abbreviated to “rc” in discussion, and as a shortcut in kubectl commands.
A simple case is to create one ReplicationController object to reliably run one instance of a Pod indefinitely. A more complex use case is to run several identical replicas of a replicated service, such as web servers.
Terraform
Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code software tool created by HashiCorp. It enables users to define and provision a datacenter infrastructure using a high-level configuration language known as HashiCorp Configuration Language, or optionally JSON.
Practical
In this practical, we are going to create a ReplicationController in Kubernetes cluster(minikube) using Terraform code.
Prerequisites
- Minikube.
- Kubectl(configured to minikube).
- Terraform.
- Visual Studio Code(with Terraform extension).
If all the prerequisites are downloaded and configured in the right way, then we start with our idea.
Here we are going to create ReplicationController of WordPress(Web Application) and MySQL(Database) pods within minikube.
After writing the code, we have to initialize the working directory. The terraform init command is used to initialize a working directory containing Terraform configuration files. This is the first command that should be run after writing a new Terraform configuration or cloning an existing one from version control. It is safe to run this command multiple times.
Then we have to validate our code to check any possible errors before applying the changes. The terraform validate command validates the configuration files in a directory, referring only to the configuration and not accessing any remote services such as remote state, provider APIs, etc.
Validate runs checks that verify whether a configuration is syntactically valid and internally consistent, regardless of any provided variables or existing state. It is thus primarily useful for general verification of reusable modules, including correctness of attribute names and value types.
If the configuration is valid , then apply the changes. The terraform apply command is used to apply the changes required to reach the desired state of the configuration, or the pre-determined set of actions generated by a terraform plan execution plan.
So, we have successfully create our ReplicationControllers using Terraform code.
