This guide covers the necessary steps to install and configure the Grey Matter service mesh on a cloud based Kubernetes cluster. While these instructions should support all versions of Kubernetes, they have been tested and confirmed against versions 1.15, 1.16, 1.17, 1.18.

Warning: The Grey Matter mesh installed at the end of this guide is not intended for production use. Contact Grey Matter Customer Support for more information on a Production deployment.

Prerequisites

1. ​helm v3​

2. ​eksctl​

3. ​kubectl​

4. Grey Matter credentials requested via Grey Matter Support​

Steps

1. Create Kubernetes Cluster

NOTE: If you already have a Kubernetes cluster up and running, move to Step 2. Just verify you can connect to the cluster with a command like kubectl get nodes.

eksctl create cluster \
    --name production \
    --version 1.17 \
    --nodegroup-name workers \
    --node-type m5.2xlarge \
    --nodes=2 \
    --node-ami auto \
    --region us-east-1 \
    --zones us-east-1a,us-east-1b \
    --profile default

eksctl get cluster --region us-east-1 --profile default
eksctl get nodegroup --region us-east-1 --profile default --cluster production

gcloud container clusters create production \
    --machine-type e2-standard-8 \
    --num-nodes 2 \
    --cluster-version 1.17 \
    --zone us-central1-a \
    --node-locations us-central1-a

gcloud container clusters list

az group create --name production --location eastus
az aks create --resource-group production \
  --name production \
  --node-vm-size standard_b8ms \
  --node-count 2 \
  --kubernetes-version 1.17.13 \
  --enable-addons monitoring \
  --generate-ssh-keys

az aks get-credentials --resource-group production --name production

az aks list

2. Set up Credentials

The credentials identified in the prerequisite steps are used to create a Kubernetes Image Pull Secret that grants access to the Grey Matter Docker images in the Grey Matter Nexus Repository.

If you do not have credentials yet, please contact Grey Matter support.

3. Get the Grey Matter Helm Charts

The Grey Matter Helm Charts are available from our GitHub helm-charts repository. Run the following command to add our helm charts repository.

helm repo add greymatter https://greymatter-io.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update

4. Set up Secrets

Using your credentials, create the following file and save it as credentials.yaml.

dockerCredentials:
  - registry: docker.greymatter.io
    email: <username>
    username: <username>
    password: <password>

5. Generate Configurations

Run the following to download the base configuration file:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/greymatter-io/helm-charts/release-2.3/global.yaml

This file is where you can specify any custom configurations for the installation. The file downloaded as is will install Grey Matter with all default values. If you wish to modify the defaults, make changes to any existing values in global.yaml.

To set more complex configurations like image versions, service environment variables, etc., check out the values files in each of the Grey Matter helm charts. Any additional configurations you wish to set can be added to the global.yaml file with the same directory structure as found in the <chart>/values.yaml file.

For example, to set the version of the Grey Matter proxy for the edge proxy, just simply replace the version as indicated below:

edge:
  version: '<desired-version>'

6. Install

Grey Matter is made up of a handful of components, each handling different pieces of the overall platform. Once you have set up your credentials.yaml and global.yaml files, run the following steps in order:

1. Install the necessary secrets

   Grey Matter requires several Kubernetes secrets. The necessary secrets have been extracted into a single helm-chart for ease of installation.

   helm install secrets greymatter/secrets --version 2.4.2 -f credentials.yaml -f global.yaml

2. Install SPIRE server and agent

   This guide will use SPIRE to issue certificates to enable mTLS through the mesh. These commands will install the SPIRE server and agents into the spire namespace.

   helm install spire-server greymatter/server --version 2.3.0 -f global.yaml

   Before installing the agent, watch the server pod come up:

   kubectl get pods -n spire -w

   Wait until the server pod is 2/2:

      NAME          READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
      server-0      2/2     Running   1          3h54m

   Then, install the spire agent:

   helm install spire-agent greymatter/agent --version 2.3.0 -f global.yaml

   Verify SPIRE installation

   kubectl get pods -n spire -w

   The SPIRE agent runs as a DaemonSet, so the number of Agent pods is directly related to how many nodes are in your cluster.

      NAME          READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
      agent-5d7q4   1/1     Running   0          3h54m
      agent-8c9lq   1/1     Running   0          3h54m
      agent-s2svz   1/1     Running   0          3h54m
      server-0      2/2     Running   1          3h54m

3. Install Grey Matter Charts

   At this point, we're ready to install Grey Matter. Grey Matter is installed through a series of Helm Charts that install the different components of Grey Matter. You'll notice we're also setting a few values on the command line. These could be updated in the global.yaml file, but we wanted to call them to your attention here.

   • global.environment: This is set to eks to drive EKS specific configurations

   • edge.ingress.type: This is set to LoadBalancer to update the Edge service to modify it to a type of LoadBalancer.

   • global.waiter.service_account.create: This is set to false to prevent the Sense helm-chart from attempting to create the waiter service account.

   helm install fabric greymatter/fabric --version 3.0.16 -f global.yaml --set=global.environment=eks
   helm install edge greymatter/edge --version 3.0.6 -f global.yaml --set=global.environment=eks --set=edge.ingress.type=LoadBalancer
   helm install sense greymatter/sense --version 3.0.11 -f global.yaml --set=global.environment=eks --set=global.waiter.service_account.create=false

   Notice in the edge installation we are setting --set=edge.ingress.type=LoadBalancer, this value sets the service type for edge. The default is ClusterIP. In this example we want an AWS ELB to be created automatically for edge ingress (see below), thus we are setting it to LoadBalancer. See the Kubernetes publishing services docs for guidance on what this value should be in your specific installation.

   If you receive Error: could not find tiller after running the above helm commands, then you're running an older version of Helm and must install Helm v3. If you need to manage multiple versions of Helm, we highly recommend using helmenv to easily switch between versions.

   While these are being installed, you can use the kubectl command to check if everything is running. When all pods are Running or Completed, the install is finished and Grey Matter is ready to go.

   kubectl get pods

   The running output will look like the following:

   NAME                           READY   STATUS      RESTARTS   AGE
   catalog-75d4c66477-h9nnr       2/2     Running     0          49s
   catalog-init-v778j             0/1     Completed   0          49s
   control-78f8ccf5f6-krlbd       1/1     Running     0          111s
   control-api-0                  2/2     Running     0          111s
   control-api-init-pblsb         0/1     Completed   0          111s
   dashboard-dd95bddbc-hrzm5      2/2     Running     0          49s
   edge-d56fd6795-qdctl           1/1     Running     0          63s
   jwt-redis-6b84846ffc-fkpjg     1/1     Running     0          111s
   jwt-security-7bc8bfb9f-jbz6l   2/2     Running     0          111s
   mesh-redis-0                   1/1     Running     0          111s
   postgres-slo-0                 1/1     Running     0          49s
   prometheus-0                   2/2     Running     0          49s
   slo-d98698db9-p7ksz            2/2     Running     0          49s

7. Accessing the Application

1. Get the User Certificate

   By default, Grey Matter leverages mutual TLS (mTLS) communications for all traffic, including inbound traffic to the mesh. This means that all https requests must include TLS certificates whether that be via a web browser or RESTful client. The Grey Matter helm charts have the ability to generate random Ingress and User certificates to ensure unique certificates every time a cluster is launched. For web based authentication, these certificates can then be imported into a web browser, to access resources in the mesh.

   Following the instructions in this guide, Grey Matter will automatically provision the required mTLS certificates for the server and the user.

   To get the user certificate, run these commands:

   kubectl get secret greymatter-user-cert -o jsonpath="{.data['tls\.crt']}" | base64 -d > tls.crt
   kubectl get secret greymatter-user-cert -o jsonpath="{.data['tls\.key']}" | base64 -d > tls.key
   kubectl get secret greymatter-user-cert -o jsonpath="{.data['ca\.crt']}" | base64 -d > ca.crt

   Then create a new p12 certificate and load it into your browser:

   openssl pkcs12 -export -out greymatter.p12 -inkey tls.key -in tls.crt -certfile ca.crt -passout pass:password

   If you want to provide your own valid certificates for ingress, set .Values.global.auto_generate_edge_certs to false and provide the cert information in the secrets chart, at .Values.edge.certificate.ingress. You will need to ensure you have a valid User certificate from the same Certificate Authority for Grey Matter to authenticate the user.

2. Access Grey Matter

   An Amazon ELB will be created automatically when we specified the flags --set=global.environment=eks and --set=edge.ingress.type=LoadBalancer during installation. The ELB is accessible through the randomly created URL attached to the edge service:

   kubectl get svc edge

   The output will look like the following:

   NAME   TYPE           CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP                                                               PORT(S)                          AGE
   edge   LoadBalancer   10.100.252.235   a255c23a43350427a93a860856d52155-1106205970.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com   10808:31098/TCP,8081:31216/TCP   4m

   Visit the url listed under EXTERNAL-IP (e.g. https://a255c23a43350427a93a860856d52155-1106205970.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com:10808/) in the browser to access the Grey Matter application:

   ​​

Configure the Grey Matter CLI

In order to add or modify service configurations, make sure you have the greymatter CLI installed.

To configure it for this installation, replace {edge-amazon-elb-dns} with the edge service external IP from step 5, and replace <path/to/greymatter/helm-charts> with the path on your machine to the Grey Matter Helm Charts directory in the block below:

export EDITOR=vim
export GREYMATTER_API_HOST={edge-amazon-elb-dns}:10808
export GREYMATTER_API_INSECURE=true
export GREYMATTER_API_PREFIX=/services/control-api/latest
export GREYMATTER_API_SSL=true
export GREYMATTER_API_SSLCERT=<path/to/greymatter/helm-charts>/certs/quickstart.crt
export GREYMATTER_API_SSLKEY=<path/to/greymatter/helm-charts>/certs/quickstart.key
export GREYMATTER_CATALOG_HOST={edge-amazon-elb-dns}:10808
export GREYMATTER_CATALOG_PREFIX=/services/catalog/latest
export GREYMATTER_CATALOG_INSECURE=true
export GREYMATTER_CATALOG_SSL=true
export GREYMATTER_CATALOG_SSLCERT=<path/to/greymatter/helm-charts>/certs/quickstart.crt
export GREYMATTER_CATALOG_SSLKEY=<path/to/greymatter/helm-charts>/certs/quickstart.key
export GREYMATTER_CATALOG_ZONENAME=zone-default-zone
export GREYMATTER_CONSOLE_LEVEL=debug

Now if you can run greymatter list cluster and greymatter list catalog_cluster and there are no errors, the CLI is properly configured.

Cleanup

Delete the Grey Matter Installation

helm uninstall sense edge fabric spire-agent spire-server secrets

Delete The Kubernetes Cluster

NOTE: this deletion actually takes longer than the output would indicate to terminate all resources. Attempting to create a new cluster with the same name will fail for some time until all resources are purged.

eksctl delete cluster --name production

[ℹ]  using region us-east-1
[ℹ]  deleting EKS cluster "production"
[✔]  kubeconfig has been updated
[ℹ]  cleaning up LoadBalancer services
[ℹ]  2 sequential tasks: { delete nodegroup "workers", delete cluster control plane "prod" [async] }
[ℹ]  will delete stack "eksctl-production-nodegroup-workers"
[ℹ]  waiting for stack "eksctl-production-nodegroup-workers" to get deleted
[ℹ]  will delete stack "eksctl-production-cluster"
[✔]  all cluster resources were deleted

gcloud container clusters delete production --quiet

Deleting cluster production...done.
Deleted [https://container.googleapis.com/v1/projects/psychic-era-307017/zones/us-central1-a/clusters/production].

az aks delete --resource-group production --name production -y