Deploying to Multiple SKAO Clusters

This guide is designed for developers working with the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) and outlines the process of configuring repositories and deploying applications to various K8s clusters within SKAO, each serving different purposes.

Deploy to K8s Clusters

SKAO utilizes GitLab runners for deploying charts to Kubernetes (K8s) clusters. The deployment destination of your jobs, and consequently the installation of your charts, depends on the GitLab runners configured in the .gitlab-ci.yml file. To specify a particular runner, set the tags field within each job. If no specific runner is designated, the default runner used is k8srunner. For instance, to deploy in the PSI-MID cluster, use the following configuration:

Runner for PSI-MID

image: $SKA_K8S_TOOLS_BUILD_DEPLOY

stages:
- lint
- build
- test
- deploy
- integration
- staging
- join-reports
- pages
- publish
- scan

k8s-test-no-operator:
    tags:
        - k8srunner-psi-mid
    extends: k8s-test
    variables:
        KUBE_NAMESPACE: 'ci-$CI_PROJECT_NAME-$CI_COMMIT_SHORT_SHA-no-op'
        SKA_TANGO_OPERATOR: 'false'
    artifacts:
        name: "$CI_PROJECT_NAME-$CI_JOB_ID"
        paths:
        - "build/"
        reports:
        junit: build/report.xml
        when: always
    environment:
        name: test/$CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG-no-op
        on_stop: stop-k8s-test-no-operator
        auto_stop_in: 1 minute
    rules:
        - exists:
            - tests/**/*

.
.
.

A comprehensive list of all available runners is accessible at https://gitlab.com/groups/ska-telescope/-/runners?status[]=ONLINE.

Debug Clusters

To diagnose issues within the cluster pods, developers should utilize kibana . Select the appropriate datacentre by setting the ska.datacentre variable as shown:

Kibana interface demonstrating how to use the ska.datacentre variable for filtering logs specific to a datacentre.

Monitor Clusters

Monitoring the status and health of different clusters is crucial. Developers can access https://k8s.stfc.skao.int/grafana/ for comprehensive dashboards with varied information about the clusters. For example, the dashboard kubernetes-compute-resources-node-pods allows you to switch between different datacentres using the Grafana variable ‘cluster’ at the top of the dashboards, as illustrated below:

Grafana interface showcasing the functionality to switch between clusters using the Grafana variable 'cluster'.