Question about your architecture

[bhajian]

1- Why did you use Kubeadmin. The kube admin docs says it supports only single master which means doesn't support HA.
2- Why didn't you use nginx which is the most industry standard for reverse proxy?

[mcapuccini]

Hi @bhajian! Thanks for asking good questions 🙂

1. The simple answer is that we don't need HA. KubeNow is part of a bigger project called phenomenal-h2020.eu. We use Kubernetes to do large scale analysis of biological data with workflow systems such as Galaxy, Luigi and Pachyderm. Under this setting it is important to have immutable infrastructure up and running on demand (meaning that deployments are short-lived, thus not needing HA), as the amount of resources needed for an analysis vary greatly throughout a project life-cycle. Using systems like Kubespray/Kargo was infeasible for us as getting resources up and running was too time consuming, making the cluster installation time dominate over the processing time. Using Kubeadm we were able to make this happening way way faster. If interested you can read more here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.06180

2. Traefik can automatically configure itself by querying the Kubernetes API. This means that when we create an Ingress Traefik will automatically update its configuration. I am not sure if this is possible with nginx (isn't it more a minimal lightweight solution?). Traefik has a really big community and even commercial support, so it is an equally valid solution IMO.

Please feel free come come back to me if you have any pointers.

[carmat88]

Hello @bhajian. Thanks for posting your questions! I second @mcapuccini comments and I'd also like to add that in regard to:

1. As you can read in our Roadmap section, the HA feature is not available yet anyway. Thus all the default benefits of using kubeadm for one single master applies. Nevertheless, based on the official Kubernetes documentation, it is actually possible to achieve HA by still using kubeadm.

2. Both the KubeNow's spirit (and the broader European project in which is embedded) is to really put emphasis on the open-source collaboration model and share it transparently. Not that it is not case with nginx, but It is a bit more tedious and cumbersome to contribute to its open-source product.

Hope we have cleared your doubts. Should you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to follow up.

Cheers.

[stephenmoloney]

In respect of the api gateway question, I think that ambassador is also an interesting option.

https://www.getambassador.io

[mcapuccini]

@stephenmoloney looks nice!

[stephenmoloney]

A little bit off topic, but i do see a place for this https://github.com/openfaas/faas in the field - not only does it encourage cloud agnostic development practices but also language agnostic development practices - as we know, there isn't only one tool for the job.