Redis master

There was nothing wrong with the previous deployment. In practical use cases, it would be rare that you would launch an application without some configuration settings. In this case, we are going to set the following configuration settings for redis-master (from the example in https://Kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/configuration/configure-redis-using-configmap/ ).

Copy and paste the following two lines into the Azure Cloud Shell editor and save it as redis-config:

maxmemory 2mb
maxmemory-policy allkeys-lru

Now we can create the ConfigMap using the following code:

kubectl create configmap example-redis-config --from-file=redis-config

You should get this as the output:

configmap/example-redis-config created

We will use the same trick to get the scoop on this ConfigMap:

kubectl describe configmap/example-redis-config

The output should look like this:

Name:         example-redis-config
Namespace:    default
Labels:       <none>
Annotations:  <none>

Data
====
redis-config:
----
maxmemory 2mb
maxmemory-policy allkeys-lru
Events:  <none>

Creating from the command line is not very portable. It would be better if we could describe the preceding code in a yaml file. If only there was a command that would get the same information in yaml format. Not to worry, kubectl has the get command:

kubectl get -o yaml configmap/example-redis-config

The preceding command gets close to what we want as shown:

apiVersion: v1
data:
  redis-config: |-
    maxmemory 2mb
    maxmemory-policy allkeys-lru
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  creationTimestamp: 2018-12-26T06:35:57Z
  name: example-redis-config
  namespace: default
  resourceVersion: "23430"
  selfLink: /api/v1/namespaces/default/configmaps/example-redis-config
  uid: 80624489-08d8-11e9-9914-82000ff4ac53

Let's create our yaml version of this. But first, let's delete the already-created ConfigMap:

kubectl delete configmap/example-redis-config

Copy and paste the following lines into a file named example-redis-config.yaml, and then save the file:

apiVersion: v1
data:
  redis-config: |-
    maxmemory 2mb
    maxmemory-policy allkeys-lru
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: example-redis-config
  namespace: default

ConfigMap is a portable way of configuring containers without having specialized images for each configuration. ConfigMap has a key-value pair for data that needs to be set on a container. In this case, redis-config is the key and
maxmemory 2mbmaxmemory-policy allkeys-lru is the value.

Run the following command:

kubectl create -f example-redis-config

The output should be as follows:

configmap/example-redis-config created

Next, run the following command:

kubectl describe configmap/example-redis-config

The preceding command returns the same output as the previous one:

Name:         example-redis-config
Namespace:    default
Labels:       <none>
Annotations:  <none>

Data
====
redis-config:
----
maxmemory 2mb
maxmemory-policy allkeys-lru
Events:  <none>

Now that we have ConfigMap defined, let's use it. Modify redis-master-deployment.yaml to use ConfigMap, as follows:

apiVersion: apps/v1 # for versions before 1.9.0 use apps/v1beta2
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: redis-master
  labels:
    app: redis
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: redis
      role: master
      tier: backend
  replicas: 1
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: redis
        role: master
        tier: backend
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: master
        image: Kubernetes /redis:v1
        env:
        - name: MASTER
          value: "true"
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /redis-master
          name: config
        resources:
          requests:
            cpu: 100m
            memory: 100Mi
        ports:
        - containerPort: 6379
      volumes:
        - name: config
          configMap:
            name: example-redis-config
            items:
            - key: redis-config
              path: redis.conf

We are using a different image Kubernetes/redis:v1 that reads redis-config from /redis-master/redis.conf (instead of the usual /etc/redis/redis.conf in the other image). As usual, we are going to explain the new sections with line numbers:

  1 apiVersion: apps/v1 # for versions before 1.9.0 use apps/v1beta2
  2 kind: Deployment
  3 metadata:
  4   name: redis-master
  5   labels:
  6     app: redis
  7 spec:
  8   selector:
  9     matchLabels:
 10       app: redis
 11       role: master
 12       tier: backend
 13   replicas: 1
 14   template:
 15     metadata:
 16       labels:
 17         app: redis
 18         role: master
 19         tier: backend
 20     spec:
 21       containers:
 22       - name: master
 23         image: Kubernetes /redis:v1
 24         env:
 25         - name: MASTER
 26           value: "true"
 27         volumeMounts:
 28         - mountPath: /redis-master
 29           name: config
 30         resources:
 31           requests:
 32             cpu: 100m
 33             memory: 100Mi
 34         ports:
 35         - containerPort: 6379
 36       volumes:
 37         - name: config
 38           configMap:
 39             name: example-redis-config
 40             items:
 41             - key: redis-config
 42               path: redis.conf

The following lines will give a detailed explanation of the preceding code:

• Lines 24-26: Show another way of configuring your running container. This method uses environment variables. In Docker form, this would be equivalent to docker run -e "MASTER=TRUE". --name master -p 6379:6379 -m 100M -c 100m -d Kubernetes /redis:v1 # set the environment variable MASTER=TRUE. Your application can  read the environment variable settings for its configuration. Check out https://12factor.net/config to see why this is a very powerful idea.
• Lines 27-28: Mounts the named volume (config that is defined in lines 36-42) at the /redis-master path on the running container. Since this is bind mount, it will hide whatever is exists on /redis-master on the original container.

In Docker terms, it would be equivalent to
docker run -v config:/redis-master. -e "MASTER=TRUE" --name master -p 6379:6379 -m 100M -c 100m -d Kubernetes /redis:v1 # mount the config folder at redis-master on the container.

• Line 36-42: Here is where Kubernetes takes the config as ENV vars to the next level.
• Line 37: Gives the volume the config.
• Line 38-39: Declares this volume should be loaded from the ConfigMap example-redis-config (which has to be already defined [unless declared optional]). We have defined this already, so we are good.
• Line 40-42: Here is where the Kubernetes magic comes in. Configure a Pod with ConfigMap (https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/configure-pod-configmap/#use-configmap-defined-environment-variables-in-pod-commands). This shows different ways you can load the config on to a pod. Here we are loading the value of the redis-config key (the two-line maxmemory settings) as a file called redis.conf.

We can check whether the settings were applied by running the following commands:

kc exec -it redis-master-<pod-id> redis-cli
 127.0.0.1:6379&gt; CONFIG GET maxmemory
 1) "maxmemory"
 2) "2097152"
 127.0.0.1:6379&gt; CONFIG GET maxmemory-policy
 1) "maxmemory-policy"
 2) "allkeys-lru"
 127.0.0.1:6379&gt;exit

To repeat, you have just performed the most important and tricky part of configuring cloud-native applications. You have also noticed that the apps have to be modified to be cloud-friendly to read config dynamically (the old image didn't support dynamic configuration easily).