Kafka-Enabled HealthCheckService Deployment on Kubernetes with GitOps

This project is a microservices architecture with Kafka as the messaging backbone. It includes the deployment and management of services on a Kubernetes cluster using GitOps principles.

⚠️ The project is an actual devops exercise and is not intended for production enviroments as such.

It is however a good starting point for getting up to speed with k8s, kafka, python and flux

Getting Started

To start the cluster and deploy the services, follow these steps:

1. Make sure Helm, kubectl and Kind are installed on your local machine

2. We'll be using Kind to setup a Kubernetes cluster with 1 control plane and 3 worker nodes

kind create cluster --name kafka-cluster --config .\kind-config.yaml

Output:

Creating cluster "kafka-cluster" ...
 ✓ Ensuring node image (kindest/node:v1.31.0) 🖼
 ✓ Preparing nodes 📦 📦 📦 📦
 ✓ Writing configuration 📜
 ✓ Starting control-plane 🕹️
 ✓ Installing CNI 🔌
 ✓ Installing StorageClass 💾
 ✓ Joining worker nodes 🚜
Set kubectl context to "kind-kafka-cluster"
You can now use your cluster with:

kubectl cluster-info --context kind-kafka-cluster

3. Optionally install kubernetes dashboard:

helm install dashboard kubernetes-dashboard/kubernetes-dashboard -n kubernetes-dashboard --create-namespace

4. Deploy Kafka

helm -n kafka-healthcheck install kafka-h oci://registry-1.docker.io/bitnamicharts/kafka -f .\helm\kafka\values.yaml --create-namespace

Create the health_checks_topic:

kubectl apply -f .\helm\kafka\kafka-topic.yaml

5. Deploy the Health Check services

Build the image:

cd services HealthCheckService
docker build -t health_check_service:latest .

Load the image into the local cluster:

kind load docker-image health_check_service:latest --name "kafka-cluster"

Deploy

kubectl apply -f deployment.yaml

❕ Follow the same steps for the ConsumerHealthCheckService adjusting the image name accordingly

6. Test the services

You can use an ephemeral busybox pod like so:

kubectl run -i --tty --rm debug --image=busybox --restart=Never -- sh
# wget -qO- http://health-check-service.kafka-healthcheck:80/check_health
[]
# wget -qO- http://consumer-health-check-service.kafka-healthcheck:80/get_latest_health_check
wget: server returned error: HTTP/1.1 404 NOT FOUND

⚠️ The /get_latest_health_check endpoint will return 404 when there are no messages in the health_check_topic

7. Deploy the monitoring tools

cd helm/grafana
helm -n kafka-healthcheck install grafana .
cd helm/prometheus
helm install prometheus prometheus-community/prometheus -f values.yaml -n kafka-healthcheck

9. Configure logging for the services to log health check results.

10. Set up Flux to automatically deploy the services when changes are pushed to the GitOps repository.

11. Kubernetes Dashboard Service Account:

cd dashboard
kubectl apply -n kubernetes-dashboard -f .\dashboard-adminuser.yaml -f .\dashboard-clusterrole.yaml -f .\dash-secret.yaml

🤖 For detailed instructions on each step, refer to the documentation in the individual files and directories.