Official Apache Pulsar Helm Chart

This is the officially supported Helm Chart for installing Apache Pulsar on Kubernetes.

Read Deploying Pulsar on Kubernetes for more details.

Features

This Helm Chart includes all the components of Apache Pulsar for a complete experience.

• Pulsar core components:
  • ZooKeeper
  • Bookies
  • Brokers
  • Functions
  • Proxies
• Management & monitoring components:
  • Pulsar Manager
  • Optional PodMonitors for each component (enabled by default)
  • Kube-Prometheus-Stack (as of 3.0.0)

It includes support for:

• Security
  • Automatically provisioned TLS certs, using Jetstack's cert-manager
    • self-signed
    • Let's Encrypt
  • TLS Encryption
    • Proxy
    • Broker
    • Toolset
    • Bookie
    • ZooKeeper
  • Authentication
    • JWT
    • Mutal TLS
    • Kerberos
  • Authorization
  • Non-root broker, bookkeeper, proxy, and zookeeper containers (version 2.10.0 and above)
• Storage
  • Non-persistence storage
  • Persistence Volume
  • Local Persistent Volumes
  • Tiered Storage
• Functions
  • Kubernetes Runtime
  • Process Runtime
  • Thread Runtime
• Operations
  • Independent Image Versions for all components, enabling controlled upgrades

Requirements

In order to use this chart to deploy Apache Pulsar on Kubernetes, the followings are required.

1. kubectl 1.18 or higher, compatible with your cluster (+/- 1 minor release from your cluster)
2. Helm v3 (3.0.2 or higher)
3. A Kubernetes cluster, version 1.18 or higher.

Environment setup

Before proceeding to deploying Pulsar, you need to prepare your environment.

Tools

helm and kubectl need to be installed on your computer.

Add to local Helm repository

To add this chart to your local Helm repository:

helm repo add apache https://pulsar.apache.org/charts

To use the helm chart:

helm install <release-name> apache/pulsar

Kubernetes cluster preparation

You need a Kubernetes cluster whose version is 1.18 or higher in order to use this chart, due to the usage of certain Kubernetes features.

We provide some instructions to guide you through the preparation: http://pulsar.apache.org/docs/helm-prepare/

Deploy Pulsar to Kubernetes

1. Clone the Pulsar Helm charts repository.

   git clone https://github.com/apache/pulsar-helm-chart

   cd pulsar-helm-chart

2. Run prepare_helm_release.sh to create required kubernetes resources for installing this Helm chart.

   • A k8s namespace for installing the Pulsar release (if -c is specified)
   • Create the JWT secret keys and tokens for three superusers: broker-admin, proxy-admin, and admin. By default, it generates asymmetric pubic/private key pair. You can choose to generate symmetric secret key by specifying --symmetric in the following command.
     • proxy-admin role is used for proxies to communicate to brokers.
     • broker-admin role is used for inter-broker communications.
     • admin role is used by the admin tools.

   ./scripts/pulsar/prepare_helm_release.sh -n <k8s-namespace> -k <pulsar-release-name> -c

3. Use the Pulsar Helm charts to install Apache Pulsar.

   This command installs and starts Apache Pulsar.

   $ helm install <pulsar-release-name> apache/pulsar

4. Access the Pulsar cluster

   The default values will create a ClusterIP for the proxy you can use to interact with the cluster. To find the IP address of proxy use:

   kubectl get service -n <k8s-namespace>

For more information, please follow our detailed quick start guide.

Customize the deployment

We provide a detailed guideline for you to customize the Helm Chart for a production-ready deployment.

You can also checkout out the example values file for different deployments.

• Deploy ZooKeeper only
• Deploy a Pulsar cluster with an external configuration store
• Deploy a Pulsar cluster with local persistent volume
• Deploy a Pulsar cluster to Minikube
• Deploy a Pulsar cluster with no persistence
• Deploy a Pulsar cluster with TLS encryption
• Deploy a Pulsar cluster with JWT authentication using symmetric key
• Deploy a Pulsar cluster with JWT authentication using asymmetric key

Disabling Kube-Prometheus-Stack CRDs

In order to disable the kube-prometheus-stack fully, it is necessary to add the following to your values.yaml:

kube-prometheus-stack:
  enabled: false
  prometheusOperator:
    enabled: false
  grafana:
    enabled: false
  alertmanager:
    enabled: false
  prometheus:
    enabled: false

Otherwise, the helm chart installation will attempt to install the CRDs for the kube-prometheus-stack. Additionally, you'll need to disable each of the component's PodMonitors. This is shown in some examples and is verified in some tests.

Upgrading

Once your Pulsar Chart is installed, configuration changes and chart updates should be done using helm upgrade.

helm repo add apache https://pulsar.apache.org/charts
helm repo update
helm get values <pulsar-release-name> > pulsar.yaml
helm upgrade -f pulsar.yaml \
    <pulsar-release-name> apache/pulsar

For more detailed information, see our Upgrading guide.

Upgrading to 2.10.0 and above

The 2.10.0+ Apache Pulsar docker image is a non-root container, by default. That complicates an upgrade to 2.10.0 because the existing files are owned by the root user but are not writable by the root group. In order to leverage this new security feature, the Bookkeeper and Zookeeper StatefulSet securityContexts are configurable in the values.yaml. They default to:

  securityContext:
    fsGroup: 0
    fsGroupChangePolicy: "OnRootMismatch"

This configuration is ideal for regular Kubernetes clusters where the UID is stable across restarts. If the process UID is subject to change (like it is in OpenShift), you'll need to set fsGroupChangePolicy: "Always".

The official docker image assumes that it is run as a member of the root group.

If you upgrade to the latest version of the helm chart before upgrading to Pulsar 2.10.0, then when you perform your first upgrade to version >= 2.10.0, you will need to set fsGroupChangePolicy: "Always" on the first upgrade and then set it back to fsGroupChangePolicy: "OnRootMismatch" on subsequent upgrades. This is because the root file won't mismatch permissions, but the RocksDB lock file will. If you have direct access to the persistent volumes, you can alternatively run chgrp -R g+w /pulsar/data before upgrading.

Here is a sample error you can expect if the RocksDB lock file is not correctly owned by the root group:

2022-05-14T03:45:06,903+0000  ERROR org.apache.bookkeeper.server.Main - Failed to build bookie server
java.io.IOException: Error open RocksDB database
    at org.apache.bookkeeper.bookie.storage.ldb.KeyValueStorageRocksDB.<init>(KeyValueStorageRocksDB.java:199) ~[org.apache.bookkeeper-bookkeeper-server-4.14.4.jar:4.14.4]
    at org.apache.bookkeeper.bookie.storage.ldb.KeyValueStorageRocksDB.<init>(KeyValueStorageRocksDB.java:88) ~[org.apache.bookkeeper-bookkeeper-server-4.14.4.jar:4.14.4]
    at org.apache.bookkeeper.bookie.storage.ldb.KeyValueStorageRocksDB.lambda$static$0(KeyValueStorageRocksDB.java:62) ~[org.apache.bookkeeper-bookkeeper-server-4.14.4.jar:4.14.4]
    at org.apache.bookkeeper.bookie.storage.ldb.LedgerMetadataIndex.<init>(LedgerMetadataIndex.java:68) ~[org.apache.bookkeeper-bookkeeper-server-4.14.4.jar:4.14.4]
    at org.apache.bookkeeper.bookie.storage.ldb.SingleDirectoryDbLedgerStorage.<init>(SingleDirectoryDbLedgerStorage.java:169) ~[org.apache.bookkeeper-bookkeeper-server-4.14.4.jar:4.14.4]
    at org.apache.bookkeeper.bookie.storage.ldb.DbLedgerStorage.newSingleDirectoryDbLedgerStorage(DbLedgerStorage.java:150) ~[org.apache.bookkeeper-bookkeeper-server-4.14.4.jar:4.14.4]
    at org.apache.bookkeeper.bookie.storage.ldb.DbLedgerStorage.initialize(DbLedgerStorage.java:129) ~[org.apache.bookkeeper-bookkeeper-server-4.14.4.jar:4.14.4]
    at org.apache.bookkeeper.bookie.Bookie.<init>(Bookie.java:818) ~[org.apache.bookkeeper-bookkeeper-server-4.14.4.jar:4.14.4]
    at org.apache.bookkeeper.proto.BookieServer.newBookie(BookieServer.java:152) ~[org.apache.bookkeeper-bookkeeper-server-4.14.4.jar:4.14.4]
    at org.apache.bookkeeper.proto.BookieServer.<init>(BookieServer.java:120) ~[org.apache.bookkeeper-bookkeeper-server-4.14.4.jar:4.14.4]
    at org.apache.bookkeeper.server.service.BookieService.<init>(BookieService.java:52) ~[org.apache.bookkeeper-bookkeeper-server-4.14.4.jar:4.14.4]
    at org.apache.bookkeeper.server.Main.buildBookieServer(Main.java:304) ~[org.apache.bookkeeper-bookkeeper-server-4.14.4.jar:4.14.4]
    at org.apache.bookkeeper.server.Main.doMain(Main.java:226) [org.apache.bookkeeper-bookkeeper-server-4.14.4.jar:4.14.4]
    at org.apache.bookkeeper.server.Main.main(Main.java:208) [org.apache.bookkeeper-bookkeeper-server-4.14.4.jar:4.14.4]
Caused by: org.rocksdb.RocksDBException: while open a file for lock: /pulsar/data/bookkeeper/ledgers/current/ledgers/LOCK: Permission denied
    at org.rocksdb.RocksDB.open(Native Method) ~[org.rocksdb-rocksdbjni-6.10.2.jar:?]
    at org.rocksdb.RocksDB.open(RocksDB.java:239) ~[org.rocksdb-rocksdbjni-6.10.2.jar:?]
    at org.apache.bookkeeper.bookie.storage.ldb.KeyValueStorageRocksDB.<init>(KeyValueStorageRocksDB.java:196) ~[org.apache.bookkeeper-bookkeeper-server-4.14.4.jar:4.14.4]
    ... 13 more

Uninstall

To uninstall the Pulsar Chart, run the following command:

helm delete <pulsar-release-name>

For the purposes of continuity, these charts have some Kubernetes objects that are not removed when performing helm delete. These items we require you to conciously remove them, as they affect re-deployment should you choose to.

• PVCs for stateful data, which you must consciously remove
  • ZooKeeper: This is your metadata.
  • BookKeeper: This is your data.
  • Prometheus: This is your metrics data, which can be safely removed.
• Secrets, if generated by our prepare release script. They contain secret keys, tokens, etc. You can use cleanup release script to remove these secrets and tokens as needed.

Troubleshooting

We've done our best to make these charts as seamless as possible, occasionally troubles do surface outside of our control. We've collected tips and tricks for troubleshooting common issues. Please examine these first before raising an issue, and feel free to add to them by raising a Pull Request!

Release Process

1. Bump the version in charts/pulsar/Chart.yaml.

2. Send a pull request for reviews.

3. After the pull request is approved, merge it. The release workflow will be triggered automatically.

   • It creates a tag named pulsar-<version>.
   • Published the packaged helm chart to Github releases.
   • Update the charts/index.yaml in Pulsar website.

4. Trigger the Pulsar website build to make the release available under https://pulsar.apache.org/charts.