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Habitat, Google Container Registry (GCR) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Stuart Paterson | Posted on | Chef Habitat

This short post will explore how we can use Habitat and Google Container Registry to deploy a managed container to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) with Habitat Operator already installed.

The example we will be following is here. Checking this out reveals the following structure:

$ tree hab-gcr-demo
hab-gcr-demo
├── README.md
├── config
│   ├── index.html
│   └── nginx.conf
├── default.toml
├── deploy-hab-gcr-demo.yml
├── hooks
│   ├── init
│   └── run
└── plan.sh

From a Habitat perspective, the key lines of the plan.sh are as follows:

pkg_deps=(core/nginx)
pkg_exports=(
   [port]=http.server.port
)

do_build() {
  return 0
}

do_install() {
  return 0
}

This means we depend on the core/nginx maintained package and don’t require any special build or installation setup. This package will export a port which is important for us to see the index.html page when deployed at a later stage. The configuration directory also includes a simple nginx.conf file.

Build the Habitat package and create the container image

With Habitat installed locally, let’s first trigger a build:

$ cd hab-gcr-demo/
$ hab pkg build .
   hab-studio: Creating Studio at /hab/studios/src (default)
   ...   

This will create a hart file in the results folder according to the origin and package name e.g.

$ ls results/
habskp-hab-gcr-demo-0.1.0-20180711153450-x86_64-linux.hart	logs
last_build.env

From the Studio or otherwise, now execute the following to create a container image. This is what we will upload to Google Container Registry.

$ hab pkg export kubernetes results/habskp-hab-gcr-demo-0.1.0-20180711153450-x86_64-linux.hart

This creates a Docker image with tags e.g.

$ docker images
REPOSITORY                                  TAG                     IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
habskp/hab-gcr-demo                         0.1.0                   ed2580b52a3a        53 seconds ago      271MB
habskp/hab-gcr-demo                         0.1.0-20180711153450    ed2580b52a3a        53 seconds ago      271MB
habskp/hab-gcr-demo                         latest                  ed2580b52a3a        53 seconds ago      271MB

Push the container image to GCR

The following command ensures we are authorized to push/pull images to Container Registry:

$ gcloud auth configure-docker

Now we run the following two commands to tag and push our image, note that the repository URI conforms to [HOSTNAME]/[PROJECT-ID]/[IMAGE]:[TAG], more details here:

$ docker tag habskp/hab-gcr-demo:latest eu.gcr.io/spaterson-project/hab-gcr-demo:latest
$ docker push eu.gcr.io/spaterson-project/hab-gcr-demo:latest
The push refers to repository [eu.gcr.io/spaterson-project/hab-gcr-demo]
567f6430b59f: Pushed 
latest: digest: sha256:a9db7cc0cf186311eddde7d5f796b998b6aad5521d435ffa63ee572d0fb1d73a size: 529

Deploy your application to GKE

With our image in the Container Registry we can deploy the application to Google Kubernetes Engine using the provided manifest:

$ cat deploy-hab-gcr-demo.yml 
apiVersion: habitat.sh/v1beta1
kind: Habitat
metadata:
  name: hab-gcr-demo
customVersion: v1beta2
spec:
  v1beta2:
    image: eu.gcr.io/spaterson-project/hab-gcr-demo:latest
    count: 1
    service:
      name: hab-gcr-demo
      topology: standalone
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: hab-gcr-demo-lb
spec:
  type: LoadBalancer
  ports:
  - name: web
    port: 80
    targetPort: 8080
  selector:
    habitat-name: hab-gcr-demo

This also creates a Kubernetes LoadBalancer to expose port 8080 from the container running nginx to a public IP address on port 80. This manifest can now be deployed to GKE:

$ kubectl apply -f deploy-hab-gcr-demo.yml 
habitat "hab-gcr-demo" created
service "hab-gcr-demo-lb" created
$ kubectl get services hab-gcr-demo-lb
NAME              TYPE           CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP      PORT(S)        AGE
hab-gcr-demo-lb   LoadBalancer   10.451.200.92   35.230.158.217   80:31696/TCP   1m

Navigating to the page we see the expected index.html:

Summary

In this walkthrough you saw how to push a Habitat managed application to GCR and how to deploy it to GKE. Watch this space, Habitat Builder integration for Google Container Registry is coming soon. Thanks for reading!

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