orbiter

README

Orbiter The Meta Cluster Manager

This project is in alpha state. The API will continue breaking until version 1.0.0 is released

What Is It

Orbiter boostraps, lifecycles and destroys clustered software and other cluster managers whereas each can be configured to span over a wide range of infrastructure providers. Its focus is laid on automating away all day two operations, as we consider them to have much bigger impacts than day one operations from a business perspective.

How Does It Work

An Orbiter instance runs as a Kubernetes Pod managing the configured clusters (i.e. an Orb), typically including the one it is running on. It scales the clusters nodes and has Node Agents install software packages on their operating systems. Node Agents run as native system processes managed by systemd. An Orbs Git repository is the only source of truth for desired state. Also, the current Orbs state is continously pushed to its Git repository, so not only changes to the desired state is always tracked but also the most important changes to the actual systems state.

For more details, take a look at the design docs.

Why Another Cluster Manager

We observe a universal trend of increasing system distribution. Key drivers are cloud native engineering, microservices architectures, global competition among hyperscalers and so on.

We embrace this trend but counteract its biggest downside, the associated increase of complexity in managing all these distributed systems. Our goal is to enable players of any size to run clusters of any type using infrastructure from any provider. Orbiter is a tool to do this in a reliable, secure, auditable, cost efficient way, preventing vendor lock-in, monoliths consisting of microservices and human failure doing repetitive tasks.

What makes Orbiter special is that it ships with a nice Mission Control UI (currently in closed alpha) providing useful tools to interact intuitively with the operator. Also, the operational design follows the GitOps pattern, highlighting day two operations, sticking to a distinct source of truth for declarative system configuration and maintaining a consistent audit log, everything out-of-the-box. Then, the Orbiter code base is designed to be highly extendable, which ensures that any given cluster type can eventually run on any desired provider.

How To Use It

In the following example we will create a kubernetes cluster on a static provider. A static provider is a provider, which has no or little API for automation, e.g legacy VM's or Bare Metal scenarios.

Create Two Virtual Machines

Install KVM https://wiki.debian.org/KVM

Create a new SSH key pair

mkdir -p ~/.ssh && ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "repo and VM bootstrap key" -P "" -f ~/.ssh/myorb_bootstrap -q

Create and setup two new Virtual Machines. Make sure you have a sudo user called orbiter on the guest OS

./examples/k8s/static/machine.sh ./examples/k8s/static/kickstart.cfg ~/.ssh/orbitertest_bootstrap.pub master1
./examples/k8s/static/machine.sh ./examples/k8s/static/kickstart.cfg ~/.ssh/orbitertest_bootstrap.pub worker1

List the new virtual machines IP addresses

for MACHINE in master1 worker1
do
    virsh domifaddr $MACHINE
done

Initialize A Git Repository

Create a new Git Repository

Add the public part of your new SSH key pair to the git repositories trusted deploy keys.

cat ~/.ssh/myorb_bootstrap

Copy the file orbiter.yml to the root of your Repository.

Replace the IPs in your orbiter.yml accordingly

Complete Your Orb Setup

Download the latest orbctl

curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/caos/orbiter/releases/latest | grep "browser_download_url.*orbctl-$(uname)-$(uname -m)" | cut -d '"' -f 4 | sudo wget -i - -O /usr/local/bin/orbctl
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/orbctl
sudo chown $(id -u):$(id -g) /usr/local/bin/orbctl

Create an orb file

mkdir -p ~/.orb
cat > ~/.orb/config << EOF
url: git@github.com:me/my-orb.git
masterkey: $(openssl rand -base64 21)
repokey: |
$(sed s/^/\ \ /g ~/.ssh/myorb_bootstrap)
EOF

Encrypt and write your ssh key pair to your repo

# Add the bootstrap key pair to the remote secrets file. For simplicity, we use the repokey here.
orbctl writesecret kvm.bootstrapkeyprivate --file ~/.ssh/myorb_bootstrap
orbctl writesecret kvm.bootstrapkeypublic --file ~/.ssh/myorb_bootstrap.pub

Bootstrap your local Kubernetes cluster

orbctl takeoff

As soon as the Orbiter has deployed itself to the cluster, you can decrypt the generated admin kubeconfig

mkdir -p ~/.kube
orbctl readsecret k8s.kubeconfig > ~/.kube/config

Wait for grafana to become running

kubectl --namespace caos-system get po -w

Open your browser at localhost:8080 to show your new clusters dashboards

kubectl --namespace caos-system port-forward svc/grafana 8080:80

Cleanup your environment

for MACHINE in master1 worker1
do
    virsh destroy $MACHINE
    virsh undefine $MACHINE
done

Operating System Requirements

See OS Requirements for details.

Supported Clusters

See Clusters for details.

Supported Providers

See Providers for details.

How To Contribute

See contribute for details

License

The full functionality of the operator is and stays open source and free to use for everyone. We pay our wages by using Orbiter for selling further workload enterprise services like support, monitoring and forecasting, IAM, CI/CD, secrets management etc. Visit our website and get in touch.

See the exact licensing terms here

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.