Astarte Operator
Astarte Operator v24.5.0-dev

View Source Prerequisites

As much as Astarte's Operator is capable of creating a completely self-contained installation, there's a number of prerequisites to be fulfilled depending on the use case.

on-your-machine

 On your machine

The following tools are required within your local machine:

  • kubectl: must be compatible with your target Kubernetes version,
  • astartectl: your version must be the same of the Astarte Operator running in your cluster,
  • helm: v3 is required.

nginx

 NGINX

Astarte currently features only one supported Managed Ingress, based on NGINX. NGINX provides routing, SSL termination and more, and as of today is the preferred/advised way to run Astarte in production.

Astarte Operator is capable of interacting with NGINX through its dedicated AstarteDefaultIngress resource, as long as an NGINX ingress controller is installed. Installing the ingress controller is as simple as running a few helm commands:

$ helm repo add ingress-nginx https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx
$ helm repo update
$ helm install ingress-nginx ingress-nginx/ingress-nginx -n ingress-nginx \
    --set controller.service.externalTrafficPolicy=Local \
    --create-namespace

Please, be aware that trying to deploy multiple ingress controllers in your cluster may result in all of them trying simultaneously to handle the Astarte ingress resource. Consider using ingress classes for avoiding confusing situations as outlined here.

In the end, you won't need to create NGINX ingresses yourself: the Astarte Operator itself will take care of this task.

rabbitmq

 RabbitMQ

For production environments, consider using RabbitMQ deployed by the [RabbitMQ Cluster Operator] (https://www.rabbitmq.com/kubernetes/operator/operator-overview) or any other managed solution that you prefer. The Astarte Operator includes only basic management of RabbitMQ, which is deprecated since v24.5 and as such it should not be relied upon when dealing with production environments. Futher details can be found here.

voyager-deprecated

 Voyager (deprecated)

Until Astarte v1.0.0, the only supported Managed Ingress was the Voyager based AstarteVoyagerIngress. Starting from Dec the 31st 2021, according to the Voyager announcement, the support for Voyager will be dropped as stated here. An alternative NGINX based Managed Ingress has been developed to replace the Voyager based solution (for reference, see the previous section).

cert-manager

 cert-manager

Astarte requires cert-manager to be installed in the cluster in its default configuration (installed in namespace cert-manager as cert-manager). If you are using cert-manager in your cluster already you don't need to take any action - otherwise, you will need to install it.

Astarte is actively tested with cert-manager 1.13, but should work with any 1.0+ releases of cert-manager. If your cert-manager release is outdated, please consider upgrading to a newer version according to this guide.

cert-manager documentation details all needed steps to have a working instance on your cluster. However, in case you won't be using cert-manager for other components beyond Astarte or, in general, if you don't have very specific requirements, it is advised to install it through its Helm chart. To do so, run the following commands:

$ helm repo add jetstack https://charts.jetstack.io
$ helm repo update
$ kubectl create namespace cert-manager
$ helm install \
  cert-manager jetstack/cert-manager \
  --namespace cert-manager \
  --version v1.13.3 \
  --set installCRDs=true

This will install cert-manager 1.13.3 and its CRDs in the cluster.

external-cassandra-scylla

 External Cassandra / Scylla

In production deployments, it is strongly advised to have a separate Cassandra cluster interacting with the Kubernetes installation. This is due to the fact that Cassandra Administration is a critical topic, especially with mission critical workloads.

Astarte Operator includes only basic management of Cassandra, which is deprecated since v1.0 and as such it should not be relied upon when dealing with production environments. Furthermore, in the near future, Cassandra support is planned to be removed from Astarte Operator in favor of the adoption of a dedicated Kubernetes Operator (e.g. Scylla Operator).

In case an external Cassandra cluster is deployed, be aware that Astarte lives on the assumption it will be the only application managing the Cluster - as such, it is strongly advised to have a dedicated cluster for Astarte.

kubernetes-and-external-components

 Kubernetes and external components

When deploying external components, it is important to take in consideration how Kubernetes behaves with the underlying infrastructure. Most modern Cloud Providers have a concept of Virtual Private Cloud, by which the internal Kubernetes Network stack directly integrates with their Network stack. This, in short, enables deploying Pods in a shared private network, in which other components (such as Virtual Machines) can be deployed.

This is the preferred, advised and supported configuration. In this scenario, there's literally no difference between interacting with a VM or a Pod, enabling a hybrid infrastructure without having to pay the performance cost.