PKS Basics

Introduction

Pivotal Container Service (PKS) enables operators to provision, operate, and manage enterprise-grade Kubernetes clusters using BOSH and Pivotal Ops Manager.

Architecture

Terminology

PKS: Pivotal Container Service (PKS) enables operators to provision, operate, and manage enterprise-grade Kubernetes clusters using BOSH and Pivotal Ops Manager.

BOSH: an open-source tool for release engineering, deployment, lifecycle management, and monitoring of distributed systemshttps://bosh.io/docs/

BOSH Release: A release is a versioned collection of configuration properties, configuration templates, start up scripts, source code, binary artifacts, and anything else required to build and deploy software in a reproducible way. Release could be a Git repo or a single tarballhttps://bosh.io/docs/release/

BOSH Development: A deployment is a collection of VMs, built from a stemcell, that has been populated with specific releases and disks that keep persistent data. These resources are created in the IaaS based on a deployment manifest and managed by the Director, a centralized management server.https://bosh.io/docs/deployment/

BOSH Stemcell: A stemcell is a versioned Operating System image wrapped with IaaS specific packaging.https://bosh.io/docs/stemcell/

CFCR: a BOSH release that offers a uniform way to instantiate, deploy, and manage highly available Kubernetes clusters on a cloud platform using BOSH.https://docs-cfcr.cfapps.io/

What CFCR are providing:

• Deploying Solutions:

  CFCR offers the following solutions to improve the experience of deploying Kubernetes clusters:

  • Repeatability and consistency when deploying “Kubernetes-as-a-service” within an organization

  • A single control plane to provision and manage Kubernetes services

• Managing Solutions:

  CFCR offers the following solutions to improve the experience of managing Kubernetes clusters:

  • High-availability and multi-AZ support: BOSH can deploy multiple master/etcd/worker nodes across multiple availability zones, and monitor their health.

  • Scaling: BOSH allows the operator to scale the number of instances in the cluster up and down by modifying the manifest.

  • VM healing: BOSH continuously monitors the health of all VM instances and recreates VMs. Self-healing VMs and monitoring via BOSH.

  • Upgrades: BOSH manages the rolling upgrade process for a fleet of Kubernetes clusters.

On-Demand Services SDK and the On-Demand Broker:

• The on-demand services SDK: provides a generic on-demand broker (ODB) that answers API calls from the Cloud Controller.

• Service authors: add service-specific functionality to the on-demand services SDK through an executable called a Service Adapter. These components combine to create a BOSH deployment.

• Tile authors customize the tile interface used by operators. The tile consumes the BOSH deployment to generate a BOSH manifest for deploying on-demand instances of the service

References:

• Official PKS website: https://pivotal.io/platform/pivotal-container-service

• PKS documentation: https://docs.pivotal.io/runtimes/pks/1-4/index.html