---
title: " Weekly Kubernetes Community Hangout Notes - July 17 2015 "
date: 2015-07-23
slug: weekly-kubernetes-community-hangout_23
url: /blog/2015/07/Weekly-Kubernetes-Community-Hangout_23
---




Every week the Kubernetes contributing community meet virtually over Google Hangouts. We want anyone who's interested to know what's discussed in this forum.

Here are the notes from today's meeting:



- Eric Paris: replacing salt with ansible (if we want)

  - In contrib, there is a provisioning tool written in ansible
  - The goal in the rewrite was to eliminate as much of the cloud provider stuff as possible
  - The salt setup does a bunch of setup in scripts and then the environment is setup with salt

    - This means that things like generating certs is done differently on GCE/AWS/Vagrant
  - For ansible, everything must be done within ansible
  - Background on ansible

    - Does not have clients
    - Provisioner ssh into the machine and runs scripts on the machine
    - You define what you want your cluster to look like, run the script, and it sets up everything at once
    - If you make one change in a config file, ansible re-runs everything (which isn’t always desirable)
    - Uses a jinja2 template
  - Create machines with minimal software, then use ansible to get that machine into a runnable state

    - Sets up all of the add-ons
  - Eliminates the provisioner shell scripts
  - Full cluster setup currently takes about 6 minutes

    - CentOS with some packages
    - Redeploy to the cluster takes 25 seconds
  - Questions for Eric

    - Where does the provider-specific configuration go?

      - The only network setup that the ansible config does is flannel; you can turn it off
    - What about init vs. systemd?

      - Should be able to support in the code w/o any trouble (not yet implemented)
  - Discussion

    - Why not push the setup work into containers or kubernetes config?

      - To bootstrap a cluster drop a kubelet and a manifest
    - Running a kubelet and configuring the network should be the only things required. We can cut a machine image that is preconfigured minus the data package (certs, etc)

      - The ansible scripts install kubelet & docker if they aren’t already installed
    - Each OS (RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu) could have a different image. We could view this as part of the build process instead of the install process.
    - There needs to be solution for bare metal as well.
    - In favor of the overall goal -- reducing the special configuration in the salt configuration
    - Everything except the kubelet should run inside a container (eventually the kubelet should as well)

      - Running in a container doesn’t cut down on the complexity that we currently have
      - But it does more clearly define the interface about what the code expects
    - These tools (Chef, Puppet, Ansible) conflate binary distribution with configuration

      - Containers more clearly separate these problems
    - The mesos deployment is not completely automated yet, but the mesos deployment is completely different: kubelets get put on top on an existing mesos cluster

      - The bash scripts allow the mesos devs to see what each cloud provider is doing and re-use the relevant bits
      - There was a large reverse engineering curve, but the bash is at least readable as opposed to the salt
    - Openstack uses a different deployment as well
    - We need a well documented list of steps (e.g. create certs) that are necessary to stand up a cluster

      - This would allow us to compare across cloud providers
      - We should reduce the number of steps as much as possible
      - Ansible has 241 steps to launch a cluster
- 1.0 Code freeze

  - How are we getting out of code freeze?
  - This is a topic for next week, but the preview is that we will move slowly rather than totally opening the firehose

    - We want to clear the backlog as fast as possible while maintaining stability both on HEAD and on the 1.0 branch
    - The backlog of almost 300 PRs but there are also various parallel feature branches that have been developed during the freeze
  - Cutting a cherry pick release today (1.0.1) that fixes a few issues
  - Next week we will discuss the cadence for patch releases
