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Getting Started

Install Clowder on your local box

As covered in the main README section, the installation process for Clowder is a breeze.

Using the above method will install Clowder locally through your Minikube instance. It will also create two new custom resource types that are easy to query: env for ClowdEnvs and app for ClowdApps.

If you would like to install Clowder manually and set up a contributing developer environment, follow the developer guide.

Create your first ClowdEnvironment

Let's make a namespace to hold all the resources we'll be creating :

kubectl create ns jumpstart

That's the example namespace we'll be using for the rest of the guide.

Now we can drop in our first resource, a ClowdEnvironment. A ClowdEnvironment, or ClowdEnv, is a custom resource that defines the environment our ClowdApp will utilize. The ClowdEnv defines what types of services our app may require and what source is providing those services. For our purposes, these services are configured to operate with ephemeral environments.

The easiest way to install a ClowdEnvironment that is fit for working with ephemeral environments is by using Bonfire.

Bonfire is a cli tool used to deploy apps into ephemeral environments. Read about getting started with bonfire on ephemeral environments here

If you're curious to see what is going to be deployed (without actually applying the config), run:

bonfire process-env -n jumpstart

You can apply the environment's config and wait for it to become "ready" using:

bonfire deploy-env -n jumpstart

This will cause bonfire to apply the default ephemeral template and set the targetNamespace to ``jumpstart```

NOTE: You will only create a ClowdEnvironment in your local minikube. Stage and Production will have one ClowdEnv, respectively, shared by all apps in that environment. The ephemeral cluster has a ClowdEnvironment created for you ahead of time when you reserve a namespace.

Let's see what the ClowdEnv does.

kubectl get env env-jumpstart -o yaml

As you can see in the output, we have providers_ for the different services. Some of these providers have caused certain deployments to appear in the environment's targetNamespace such as kafka, minio, featureflags service, etc. These will be used by ClowdApps associated with this environment.

Accessing services running inside your namespace

Pods running within your kubernetes cluster can access the services set up by the ClowdEnvironment. However, if you are wanting to access a ClowdEnv-provided service (Kafka, Minio, etc) directly from your host we need edit to your /etc/hosts mappings. Our example uses Kafka, so we are going to look up the bootstrap service address in our environment:

kubectl get kafka -n jumpstart -o jsonpath='{.items[0].status.listeners[0].bootstrapServers}' | cut -f1 -d':'

This is your kafka cluster's boostrap FQDN. It will look similar to:

env-jumpstart-cadf501e-kafka-bootstrap.jumpstart.svc

Your /etc/hosts should now look like ::

127.0.0.1   localhost ...  env-jumpstart-cadf501e-kafka-bootstrap.jumpstart.svc.

You can then use kubectl port-forward svc/env-jumpstart-cadf501e-kafka-bootstrap -n jumpstart 9092:9092 and access the kafka broker using env-jumpstart-cadf501e-kafka-bootstrap.jumpstart.svc:9092

Create your first ClowdApp

Now that we have a ClowdEnv up and running, let's use those providers and get some pods going. We can do that using a ClowdApp. You can think of a ClowdApp much like a Deployment resource, but more powerful. In your ClowdApp, you define everything your app needs to run: database names, object storage, environment variables, container images, and cron jobs; the whole party. We'll start small and use the example.

The API docs for ClowdApps can be found on redhatinsights.github.io.

A fully annotated ClowdApp file can be found in the Clowder examples directory.

Now let's add our ClowdApp:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RedHatInsights/clowder/master/docs/examples/clowdapp.yml -n jumpstart

Let's verify that ClowdApp was created:

kubectl get app -n jumpstart

Now you should see pods!:

kubectl get pods -n jumpstart -w

This should show you several running pods. Some of them we defined in our ClowdApp, some we did not. Pods like Kafka are defined in the ClowdEnv and spun up when the environment was created, while others are related to your ClowdApp. As a note, your app will not come up until the all ClowdEnv's managed deployments are marked as ready.

That's it! You have a running ClowdApp deployed with Clowder. In the next few documents, we'll cover creating a more powerful dev environment, building a more complex ClowdApp, and migrating existing services over to Clowder.