Tag Archives: Kubernetes

KCNA

I successfully went into, and passed my #KCNA exam. I actually bought the exam coupon last December and just hadn’t got round to doing the exam.

I ended up walking away with only 3 questions wrong. Two I wasn’t sure of anyway, so I’ll assume I got those wrong. The third however, I’m not sure which one I got wrong.

However there was one question in there which technically had no correct answers selectable. The question was this:

Which of the following is a valid Kubernetes pod restart policy?

  • on init
  • on update
  • on startup
  • on failure

None of the above are, strictly speaking, correct. It should be OnFailure and not on failure — see the Kubernetes docs.

I picked on failure as that is the closest to being correct.

I’ll be pretty pissed if they marked me wrong on this question.

Binding GCP Accounts to GKE Service Accounts with Terraform

Kubernetes uses Service Accounts to control who can access what within the cluster, but once a request leaves the cluster, it will use a default account. Normally this is the default Google Compute Engine account in GKE, and this has extremely high level access and could result in a lot of damage if your cluster is compromised.

In this article, I will be setting up a GKE cluster using a minimal access service account and enabling Workflow Identity.

Continue reading →

CKAD

It’s taken me nearly a year, but I finally figured out one of the questions that stumped me in my CKAD (writeup: https://blenderfox.com/2019/12/01/ckad-writeup/)

In the exam, the question was to terminate a cronjob if it lasts longer than 17 seconds. There’s a startup deadline but not a duration deadline. It could be implemented within the command of the application itself, or by specifying to replace any previous running version of the jobs.

Well, I finally had that situation recently at work and wanted to terminate a cronjob if it was active more than 5 minutes, since the job shouldn’t take that long. Finally found out that the answer was not in the CronJob documentation, but in the Job documentation.

CronJobs spawn a Job resource, and within the specification, you can include spec.activeDeadlineSeconds. This will terminate the job pod at that time and will consider the job as failed.

The “Snowball” Effect In Kubernetes

So, a weird thing occurred in Kubernetes on the GKE cluster we have at the office. I figured I would do a write up here, before I forget everything and maybe allow the Kubernetes devs to read over this as an issue (https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/93783)

We noticed some weirdness occurring on our cluster when Jobs and CronJobs started behaving strangely.

Jobs were spawning but seemed to not spawn any pods to go with it, even over an hour later, they were sitting there without a pod to go with it.

Investigating other jobs, I found a crazy large number of pods in one of our namespaces, over 900 to be exact. These pods were all completed pods from a CronJob.

The CronJob was scheduled to run every minute, and the definition of the CronJob had valid values for the history — sensible values for .spec.successfulJobsHistoryLimit and .spec.failedJobsHistoryLimit were set. And even if they weren’t, the defaults would (or should) be used.

So why did we have over 900 cron pods, and why weren’t they being cleaned up upon completion?

Just in case the number of pods were causing problems, I cleared out the completed pods:

kubectl delete pods -n {namespace} $(kubectl get pods -n {namespace} | grep Completed | awk '{print $1}' | xargs)

But even after that, new jobs weren’t spawning pods. And in fact, more CronJob pods were appearing in this namespace. So I disabled the CronJob

kubectl patch cronjobs -n {namespace} {cronjob-name} -p '{"spec" : {"suspend" : true }}'

But that also didn’t help, pods were still being generated. Which is weird — why is a CronJob still spawning pods even when it’s suspended?

So then I remembered that CronJobs actually generate Job objects. So I checked the Job objects and found over 3000 Job objects. Okay, something is seriously wrong here, there shouldn’t be 3000 Job objects for something that only runs once a minute.

So I went and deleted all the CronJob related Job objects:

kubectl delete job -n {namespace} $(kubectl get jobs -n {namespace} | grep {cronjob-name} | awk '{print $1}' | xargs)

This reduced the pods down, but did not help us determine why the Job objects were not spawning pods.

I decided to get Google onto the case and raised a support ticket.

Their first investigation brought up something interesting. They sent me this snippet from the Master logs (redacted)

2020-08-05 10:05:06.555 CEST - Job is created
2020-08-05 11:21:16.546 CEST - Pod is created
2020-08-05 11:21:16.569 CEST - Pod (XXXXXXX) is bound to node
2020-08-05 11:24:11.069 CEST - Pod is deleted

2020-08-05 12:45:47.940 CEST - Job is created
2020-08-05 12:57:22.386 CEST - Pod is created
2020-08-05 12:57:22.401 CEST - Pod (XXXXXXX) is bound to node

Spot the problem?

The time between “Job is created” and “Pod is created” around 80 minutes in the first case, and 12 minutes in the second one. That’s right, it took 80 minutes for the Pod to be spawned.

And this is where it dawned on me about what was possibly going on.

  • The CronJob spawned a Job object. It tried to spawn a pod, and that took a significant amount of time, far more than the 1 minute between runs
  • The next cycle, the CronJob looks to see if it has a running pod due to the .spec.concurrencyPolicy value.
  • The CronJob does not find a running pod so generates another Job object, which also gets stuck waiting for pod generation
  • And so on, and so on.

Each time, a new Job gets added, gets stuck waiting for pod generation for an abnormally long time, which causes another Job to be added to the namespace which also gets stuck…

Eventually, the pod will generate but by then there’s now a backlog of Jobs, meaning even if I suspended the CronJob, it won’t have any effect until the Jobs in the backlog are cleared or deleted (I had deleted them).

Google investigated further, and found the culprit:

Failed calling webhook, failing open www.up9.com: failed calling webhook "www.up9.com": Post https://up9-sidecar-injector-prod.up9.svc:443/mutate?timeout=30s: net/http: request canceled while waiting for connection (Client.Timeout exceeded while awaiting headers)

We were testing up9 and this was using a webhook, so it looks like a misbehaving webhook was causing this problem. We removed the webhook and everything started working again.

So where does this leave us? Well, a few thoughts:

  • A misbehaving/misconfigured webhook can cause a Snowball effect in the cluster causing multiple runs of a single CronJob without cleanup — successfulJobsHistoryLimit and failedJobsHistoryLimit values are seemingly ignored.
  • This could break systems where the CronJob is supposed to be run mutually exclusively, since the delay in pod generation could allow two cron pods to spawn together, even though the CronJob has a concurrencyPolicy set as Forbid.
  • If someone managed (whether intentionally or maliciously) to install a webhook that causes this pod spawning delay, and then adds a CronJob that runs once a minute — and then maliciously crafts the job to never finish, this snowball effect will cause the cluster to run out of resource and/or scale up nodes forever or until it hits the max allowed by your configuration.

CKA Exam Passed

5 questions I could not answer, and one I could, but arguably that question was ambiguous

  1. Fix a broken cluster — kubelet was started but couldn’t connect to itself.
  2. Add node to cluster. Nodes do not have kubeadm installed.
  3. Static pod. Couldn’t find where the path was to put the manifests for the yaml.

4 and 5 I can’t remember the questions but will update if I remember

Ambiguous Question:

  1. Create a pod with a persistent volume, that isn’t persistent, and doesn’t tell you how big to make the PV. I used emptyDir, but that’s not really a PV (didn’t create a PV or a PVC)

CKAD Writeup

So I did the CKAD exam and it was one of the latest exams I’ve done, starting at 22:45 and finishing at 00:45. The CKAD exam is 2 hours versus the CKA’s 3 hours

And I went into the exam feeling relatively confident. But, damn, the 2 hours goes by really quickly.

Had several questions I wasn’t able to complete or only partially complete.

Liveness and Readiness Probes

This question wanted a pod to be restarted if an endpoint returns 500. Simple enough, but there was a catch, if another endpoint returns 500, then the application is starting, and so disregard the check.

I used similar by implementing this check as a curl command in a real life scenario (I should write a blog entry on that some time).

So in the exam, I did both the liveness and readiness checks to chain two curl commands together, if the first endpoint (/starting) in this case, returned 200, then it would do the next endpoint (/healthz) and return a fail if that gave a 500.

Buuuuut, the image didn’t have curl installed so the probes failed. I could use the hack I’ve used in my image and install curl as part of the check, but time constraints wouldn’t let me.

Persistent Volumes

Similar to the CKA question, there was a quirkily worded question here which wanted me to add a file to a node, create a pod that used hostPath and reserve a 1Gi PV. The documentation does not provide an example of that, just a pod with a hostPath as an internal volume: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/storage/volumes/#hostpath

Network Policies

A technology I haven’t used in Kubernetes yet. They gave several policies, one that allowed “app:proxy” and one that allowed “app:db” and wanted ius to edit a pod to only be allowed to talk to only those.

We were not allowed to modify the policies. I can’t remember whether we were allowed to create new policies for this question

But both those policies use the app label. And the pod can’t have the same label with two values (I did try)

Though thinking about it now, and after a few checks, the NetworkPolicy object describes how to restrict traffic to the pods in question — so those selectors may be related to the pods the policy is restricting. I think I should have looked inside the policies more carefully to see what it was saying on the ingress rule and see if it was saying something like “app:frontend”, and then making sure the pod was labelled accordingly.

“Ambassador” Sidecar Pattern

A big chunk of the exam time was taken up by the sidecar questions — far more time than I would have liked, to be honest.

They had a question on adaptor, using fluentd, which was fine, I got that to work, but also had another where I had to use HAProxy to proxy requests do a different port (ambassador pattern). A useful use case, but I ran out of time to finish it. I wanted to come back and revisit it if I had time, but didn’t.

CronJobs

Terminate a cronjob if it lasts longer than 17 seconds. There’s a startup deadline but not a duration deadline. It could be implemented within the command of the application itself, or by specifying to replace any previous running version of the jobs.

Thoughts

I don’t think I passed this, having so many issues is probably going to take me into the 60s mark.

CKA Exam Passed

I’ve totally forgotten to write this up, but I successfully passed my CKA exam on the third attempt with a 78% score, scraping a pass.

I’ll write up details of some of the questions I couldn’t answer so I can come back and look them up later.

LPIC-1 Expiry and Google+

Well, it was due to happen eventually, but I got an email saying my LPIC-1 certification is going to expire in 9 months, and I never got to finish LPIC-2.

Well, maybe I’ll redo it after I got my Kubernetes certifications

Finally while writing this post, I notice that WordPress is now removing Google+ support because Google are shutting it down. A pity really, since I did like Google+ and while it didn’t take off, a lot of the features were in G+ because general use, like Hangouts.

General Updates

So I haven’t been posting here much recently so here are some updates.

Been slowing trying to get back into running, have been slacking off WAAAAY too much lately. Tried using Aaptiv (@aaptiv) which is a training fitness app that has trainers talking you through the stuff, there are a few problems with it.

  1. When you use a stretch/strength training routine or yoga routine, you’re reliant on them telling you what to do, there’s no video guide to show you the correct form, and that’s bad. Other apps like FitBit Coach has videos where you can copy the coach to make sure you have the right form.
  2. On Treadmill/Running routines, they talk in mph, but treadmills here in the UK go in km/h, which requires conversion (1.0 mph = 1.6 kph)

On a separate note, I have bought another attempt at the CKA exam, but this time bought the bundle with the Kubernetes Fundamentals Training from Linux Foundation. Let’s see how different that is to Linux Academy’s training….