Deploy on Kubernetes with Helm

You can deploy Timeplus Enterprise on a Kubernetes cluster with Helm.

Prerequisites

• Ensure you have Helm 3.12 + installed in your environment. For details about how to install Helm, see the Helm documentation
• Ensure you have Kubernetes 1.25 or higher installed in your environment. We tested our software and installation process on Amazon EKS, minikube and k3s. Other Kubernetes distributions should work in the similar way.
• Ensure you have allocated enough resources for the deployment. For a 3-nodes cluster deployment, by default each timeplusd requires 2 cores and 4GB memory. You'd better assign the node with at least 8 cores and 16GB memory.
• Network access to Docker Hub

Quickstart with minikube or kind

This is the quickstart guide to install a 3 nodes Timeplus Enterprise cluster with default configurations on minikube or kind using Helm package manager.

Although this guidance is focus on minikube or kind, you should be able to install it on other Kubernetes, such as Amazon EKS or your own Kubernetes cluster as well. You may need to update configurations accordingly to fit your Kubernetes environment. Please refer to Configuration Guide for available values of the chart.

Get minikube or kind ready

minikube

Please follow https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/ to get the minikube ready. For Mac users, you may get it via:

brew install minikube
minikube start

kind

Please follow https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/ to get the kind ready. For Mac users, you may get it via:

brew install kind
kind create cluster

Add Timeplus Helm chart repository

Simply run the following commands to add the repo and list charts from the repo.

helm repo add timeplus https://install.timeplus.com/charts
helm repo update
helm search repo timeplus -l

A sample output would be:

NAME                        	CHART VERSION	APP VERSION	DESCRIPTION
timeplus/timeplus-enterprise	v3.0.3       	2.4.25     	Helm chart for deploying a cluster of Timeplus ...
timeplus/timeplus-enterprise	v3.0.2       	2.4.18     	Helm chart for deploying a cluster of Timeplus ...

Please choose the latest CHART VERSION. Staring from v3.0.0 chart version, the APP VERSION is the same version as Timeplus Enterprise.

Create Namespace

User can choose to install the Timeplus Enterprise into different namespace. In this guide, we use namespace name timeplus.

export NS=timeplus
kubectl create ns $NS

Prepare the values.yaml

Copy and paste the following sample yaml file into values.yaml.

provision:
  users:
    - username: timeplus_user
      password: changeme
timeplusd:
  # -- Current only support replicas 1 or 3
  replicas: 3
  storage:
    stream:
      className: <Your storage class name>
      size: 10Gi
      selector: null
    history:
      className: <Your storage class name>
      size: 10Gi
      selector: null
  defaultAdminPassword: timeplusd@t+
  resources:
    limits:
      cpu: "32"
      memory: "60Gi"
    requests:
      cpu: "2"
      memory: 4Gi

Then make changes to better fit your need.

1. Update the storage class name and size accordingly. You can check available storage classes on your cluster by running kubectl get storageclass. Common values are local, standard, ebs-gp3-basic-auto-delete, ebs-gp3-basic-encrypted, etc.
2. Update the username and password of the provision.users. You will be able to login to Timeplus web with those users. See User management section for advanced user management.
3. Update defaultAdminPassword. This is the password for the default admin user proton, which is used internally in the system.
4. Review and update the replicas. Set it to 3 to setup a cluster with 3 timeplusd nodes. Set it to 1 to setup a single node for testing or small workload.
5. Update the resources and make sure your cluster has enough CPU and memory to run the stack. For a 3-nodes cluster deployment, by default each timeplusd requires 2 cores and 4GB memory. You'd better assign the node with at least 8 cpu and 16GB memory.
6. Optionally refer to Configuration Guide and add other configurations.

Install Helm chart

In this step, we install the helm chart using release name timeplus.

export RELEASE=timeplus
helm -n $NS install -f values.yaml $RELEASE timeplus/timeplus-enterprise

You can run kubectl -n $NS get jobs to check whether timeplus-provision is completed or not. Once this job is completed, you can start use Timeplus Enterprise.

It will take 1 or 2 minutes to start the whole stack, run following kubectl get pods -n $NS to check the stack status, for example:

NAME                                  READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
timeplus-appserver-75dff8f964-g4fl9   1/1     Running   0          118s
timeplus-connector-7c85b7c9c9-gwdtn   1/1     Running   0          118s
timeplus-provision-pqdjj              0/1     Completed 0          118s
timeplus-web-58bcb4f486-s8wmx         1/1     Running   0          118s
timeplusd-0                           1/1     Running   0          118s
timeplusd-1                           1/1     Running   0          118s
timeplusd-2                           1/1     Running   0          118s

If all the pods status are in Running status, except timplus-provision-.., then the stack is ready to access. If some pods cannot turn to Running status, you can run kubectl describe pod <pod_name> -n $NS to get more information.

Expose the Timeplus Console

There are different ways to expose the services of Timeplus stack. In this step, we use port forward of kubectl to get a quick access. Run kubectl port-forward svc/timeplus-appserver 8000:8000 -n $NS --address 0.0.0.0 and then open the address http://localhost:8000 in your browser to visit Timeplus Console web UI. After finishing the onboarding, you should be able to login with the username and password which you set in additionalUsers.

Upgrade Timeplus Enterprise

Please check the release notes to confirm the target version of Timeplus Enterprise can be upgraded in-place, by reusing the current data and configuration. For example 2.3 and 2.4 are incompatible and you have to use migration tools.

If you confirm you can upgrade to the new version, you can run the following commands to upgrade to the latest version:

helm repo update
helm -n $NS upgrade $RELEASE timeplus/timeplus-enterprise

You can also check the available versions and upgrade to a specific version:

helm repo update
helm search repo timeplus -l
helm -n $NS upgrade $RELEASE timeplus/timeplus-enterprise --version va.b.c

Uninstall and cleanup

To uninstall the helm release, just run helm -n $NS uninstall $RELEASE to uninstall it.

Please note, by default, all the PVCs will not be deleted. You can use kubectl get pvc -n $NS and kubectl delete pvc <pvc_name> -n $NS to manually delete them.

You can run kubectl delete namespace $NS to delete all PVCs and the namespace.

Operations

User management

Currently Timeplus web doesn't support user management yet. You will need to deploy the timeplus cli pod to run timeplus cli to manage users. In order to do so, please add the following section to values.yaml :

timeplusCli:
  enabled: true

Then upgrade the helm chart via:

helm -n $NS upgrade -f values.yaml $RELEASE timeplus/timeplus-enterprise

Once timeplus-cli pod is up and running, you can run kubectl exec -n $NS -it timeplus-cli -- /bin/bash to run commands in the pod. Please refer to the following commands to do the user management. Make sure you update the command accordingly to your own deployment.

# Get the IP of timeplusd pods
export TIMEPLUSD_POD_IPS=timeplusd-0.timeplusd-svc.timeplus.svc.cluster.local:8463

# List users
timeplus user list --address ${TIMEPLUSD_POD_IPS} --admin-password timeplusd@t+

# Create an user with username "hello" and password "word"
timeplus user create --address ${TIMEPLUSD_POD_IPS} --admin-password timeplusd@t+ --user hello --password world

# Delete the user "hello"
timeplus user delete --address ${TIMEPLUSD_POD_IPS} --admin-password timeplusd@t+ --user hello

Recover from EBS snapshots

If you deploy Timeplus Enterprise on Amazon EKS, assuming that you are using EBS volume for persistent volumes, you can use EBS snapshots to backup the volumes. Then in the case of data lost (for example, the EBS volume is broken, or someone accidentally delete the data on the volume ), you can restore the persistent volumes from EBS snapshots with the following steps:

Step 1 - Find snapshots of a workspace

First, we need to find out the PV name

kubectl get pvc -n $NS proton-data -o=jsonpath='{.spec.volumeName}'

You will get the PV name looks like this

pvc-ff33a8a4-ed91-4192-8a4b-30e4368b6670

Then you use this PV name to get the EBS volume ID

kubectl describe pv pvc-ff33a8a4-ed91-4192-8a4b-30e4368b6670 -o=jsonpath='{.spec.csi.volumeHandle}'

You will get the volume ID looks like this

vol-01b243a849624a2be

Now you can use this volume ID to list the available snapshot

aws ec2 describe-snapshots --output json --no-cli-pager --filter 'Name=volume-id,Values=vol-01b243a849624a2be' | jq '.Snapshots | .[] | select(.State == "completed") | .SnapshotId + " " + .StartTime'

You will see the snapshot IDs with the time when the snapshot was created, like

"snap-064a198d977abf0d9 2022-10-13T09:22:15.188000+00:00"
"snap-037248e84dcb666aa 2022-10-11T09:29:57.456000+00:00"
"snap-0a92fb9ab6c976356 2022-10-09T09:23:19.104000+00:00"
"snap-005ebf9d0c1006a5b 2022-10-06T09:23:42.775000+00:00"
"snap-0e39d233cece1b015 2022-10-04T09:15:59.079000+00:00"
"snap-04eb5d2ba8b50c432 2022-10-02T09:18:39.147000+00:00"

You will pick one snapshot from the list for the recovery (usually the latest one).

Step 2 - Create an EBS volume with the snapshot

Assume the snapshot ID you pick is snap-064a198d977abf0d9, now you create an EBS volume by

aws ec2 create-volume --output yaml --availability-zon us-west-2a --snapshot-id snap-064a198d977abf0d9 --volume-type gp3

info

In this example, we didn't use --iops nor --throughput. But in real case, you might need to use them. So before running this command, run (replace vol-01b243a849624a2be with the volume ID you found in step 1 above):

aws ec2 describe-volumes --filters 'Name=volume-id,Values=vol-01b243a849624a2be'

And you will find the Iops and Throughput from the output, make sure the new volume you are going to create matches these values.

After running the create-volume command, you will see output looks like

AvailabilityZone: us-west-2a
CreateTime: '2022-10-13T20:05:53+00:00'
Encrypted: false
Iops: 3000
MultiAttachEnabled: false
Size: 80
SnapshotId: snap-064a198d977abf0d9
State: creating
Tags: []
Throughput: 125
VolumeId: vol-0d628e0096371cb67
VolumeType: gp3

The VolumeId is what you need for next step, in this example, it is vol-0d628e0096371cb67.

Step 3 - Create a new PV

Firstly, use the PV name you found in step 1 and the volume ID of volume you created in step 2 to run the following command to generate the YAML file for the new PV you are going to create:

kubectl get pv pvc-17510f7b-8e66-472d-a1dc-4245b2f51e1a -oyaml | yq 'del(.metadata.creationTimestamp) | del(.metadata.resourceVersion) | del(.metadata.uid) | del(.status) | .spec.csi.volumeHandle = "vol-0d628e0096371cb67" | .metadata.name = "pvc-manual-vol-0d628e0096371cb67"' > new-pv.yaml

Then use the YAML file to create the PV

kubectl apply -f new-pv.yaml

Step 4 - Make the proton pod use the new PV

First, delete the existing PV

kubectl delete pv pvc-17510f7b-8e66-472d-a1dc-4245b2f51e1a

Even though it will show the PV is deleted, but the command will be blocked because the PV is currently in-use. So leave this along, and open a new terminal to run the next command.

Next, delete the existing pvc

kubectl delete pvc -n $NS proton-data

Similarly, this command will also be blocked because the PVC is in-use. Leave it alone, and open a new terminal to run the next command.

Finally, delete the proton pod

kubectl delete pod -n $NS proton-0

Once the pod is deleted, the previous commands will also be unblocked thus the existing PVC and PV will be deleted.

Once the new pod is up and running, it will use the PV you previously created manually. You can double check by

kubectl get pvc -n $NS proton-data -o=jsonpath='{.spec.volumeName}'

It should return the name you used in your new PV, in this example it is pvc-manual-vol-0d628e0096371cb67.

Troubleshooting

If something goes wrong, you can run the following commands to get more information.

1. kubectl get pods -n $NS: Make sure all pods are in Running status and the READY is 1/1.
2. kubectl logs <pod> -n $NS: Try to check the logs of each pod to make sure there is no obvious errors.
3. Run kubectl cluster-info dump -n $NS to dump all the information and send it to us.

Configuration Guide

Key	Type	Default	Description
global.affinity	object		This is the global affinity settings. Once set, it will be applied to every single component. If you'd like to set affinitiy for each component, you can set affinity under component name. For example you can use timeplusd.affinity to control the affinity of timeplusd Refer to https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/scheduling-eviction/assign-pod-node/
global.imagePullPolicy	string	"IfNotPresent"	This setting is available for each component as well.
global.imageRegistry	string	""	This setting is available for each component as well.
global.nodeSelector	object
global.pvcDeleteOnStsDelete	bool	false	These two options are only valid with k8s >= 1.27.0
global.pvcDeleteOnStsScale	bool	false
global.tolerations	list	[]
ingress.domain	string	null	If you want use an ip, pls remove it. it's will match all (equal *).
ingress.enabled	bool	false	You will need to manually create ingress if you don't want to enable it here.
provision.dashboards	bool	true	Monitoring dashboards
provision.enabled	bool	true	Once enabled, a Job will be created to provision default resources such as users, licenses, and etc. This Job shares the same configurations (e.g. resource limit) as timeplusCli below
provision.users	list	[ { "password": "changeme", "username": "timeplus_user" } ]	The users that you can use to login Timeplus web. You will need to provision at least one user if you want to use Timeplus web and Timeplus appserver.
timeplusAppserver.configs	object		e.g. enable-authentication: true
timeplusAppserver.enabled	bool	true	Timeplus web, Timeplus connector will not work properly if Timeplus appserver is not enabled.
timeplusAppserver.extraContainers	list	[]	Extra containers that to be run together with the main container.
timeplusAppserver.extraVolumes	list	[]	Extra volumes that to be mounted
timeplusAppserver.image	string	"timeplus/timeplus-appserver"
timeplusCli.enabled	bool	false
timeplusCli.image	string	"timeplus/timeplus-cli"
timeplusConnector.enabled	bool	true
timeplusConnector.extraContainers	list	[]	Extra containers that to be run together with the main container.
timeplusConnector.extraVolumes	list	[]	Extra volumes that to be mounted
timeplusConnector.image	string	"timeplus/timeplus-connector"
timeplusWeb.enabled	bool	true
timeplusWeb.image	string	"timeplus/timeplus-web"
timeplusd.config	object
timeplusd.defaultAdminPassword	string	"timeplusd@t+"	Timeplus appserver will use this username and password to connect to timeplusd to perform some administration operations such as user management.
timeplusd.enabled	bool	true
timeplusd.extraContainers	list	[]	Extra containers that to be run together with the main container.
timeplusd.extraVolumes	list	[]	Extra volumes that to be mounted
timeplusd.image	string	"timeplus/timeplusd"
timeplusd.ingress.enabled	bool	false	Enable ingress if you want to connect to timeplusd directly
timeplusd.ingress.restPath	string	"/timeplusd"	To send REST API call to timeplusd, the URL will be http(s)://publicDomain:port/restPath e.g. - curl http://timeplus.local/timeplusd/info - curl http://timeplus.local/timeplusd/v1/ddl/streams
timeplusd.initJob.image	string	"timeplus/boson"
timeplusd.livenessProbe	object	{ "failureThreshold": 20, "httpGet": { "path": "/timeplusd/ping", "port": "http-streaming", "scheme": "HTTP" }, "initialDelaySeconds": 30, "periodSeconds": 30, "successThreshold": 1, "timeoutSeconds": 1 }	K8s liveness probe for timeplusd. Please refer to https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/configure-liveness-readiness-startup-probes/
timeplusd.replicas	int	3	Current only support replicas 1 or 3
timeplusd.resources	object	{ "limits": { "cpu": "32", "memory": "60Gi" }, "requests": { "cpu": "2", "memory": "4Gi" } }	Make sure at least 2 cores are assigned to each timeplusd
timeplusd.service	object	{ "type": "ClusterIP" }	Update this section if you want to expose timeplusd directly
timeplusd.service.type	string	"ClusterIP"	Update type to NodePort and then all timeplusd ports (rest API, metrics, and etc.) will be exposed.
timeplusd.storage.history	object	{ "className": "local-storage", "selector": { "matchLabels": { "app": "timeplusd-data-history" } }, "size": "10Gi" }	PV settings for historical strogae.
timeplusd.storage.log	object	{ "className": "local-storage", "enabled": false, "selector": { "matchLabels": { "app": "timeplusd-log" } }, "size": "10Gi" }	PV settings for logs. It is disabled by default so you don't need a separate PV for it.
timeplusd.storage.stream	object	{ "className": "local-storage", "selector": { "matchLabels": { "app": "timeplusd-data-stream" } }, "size": "10Gi" }	PV settings for streaming strogae.