Planning Your Installation¶
Before proceeding, we recommend you first review our Architecture Overview page.
Our installation process requires ansible to be installed either locally on your computer, or remotely on a linux machine. Please ensure this has been setup prior to continuing with this installation process.
License Key¶
You may purchase, or request a free demo license key, here: computestacks.com/pricing
Supported Linux Distribution¶
Our supported linux distribution is Debian 11 Bullseye.
Domain Names¶
Having your domain names setup is a critical part of the installation process.
The following roles will require domain names:
| Controller | this is the main URL for the service. Examples include: portal, dashboard, or cp. |
| Container Registry | Examples: cr., or registry.. |
| Metrics | For our log aggregation service and container metrics. This should be specific to the region it's in, such as: metrics.region.example.com. |
| App URL | This is the default URL we use to generate domains for each service (container). This can be something like a.region.example.com. Each Availability zone will need to have their own domain, which is why I recommend including the region and AZ in the URL. For example, if you have regions in Amsterdam and Frankfurt, you could use something like this:
a.ams.example.net <-- Region AMS, Availability Zone 1
b.ams.example.net <-- Region AMS, Availability Zone 2
a.fra.example.net <-- Region FRA, Availability Zone 1
b.fra.example.net <-- Region FRA, Availability Zone 2
|
Example DNS Records
a.dev.cmptstks.net. IN A %{floating_ip}
metrics.dev.cmptstks.net. IN A %{PUBLIC IP OF METRICS SERVER}
*.a.dev.cmptstks.net. IN CNAME a.dev.cmptstks.net.
portal.dev.cmptstks.net. IN A %{controller ip address}
cr.dev.cmptstks.net. IN CNAME portal.dev.cmptstks.net.
Choosing a DNS Server¶
We require a DNS integration for our platform; there are two supported options:
- Use our free hosted DNS service, or;
- Host your own PowerDNS servers.
During installation, the default will be to use a shared demo account. Please contact us for your hosted dns credentials, or for help setting up your own PowerDNS cluster.
Linux Users and Groups¶
Our container nodes depend on having UID & GID 1001 available for our use. This is generally not a problem on most cloud and virtual machine images, however if you performed some pre-installation steps that included creating a user, this UID/GID may be already taken.
Please change the UID and GID of the user who took that ID before proceeding. Here is a guide to help you accomplish this.
You can verify that this is available by running the following commands on the container nodes:
cat /etc/passwd | grep 1001
cat /etc/group | grep 1001
Network Setup¶
Our recommended ip setup is: 1 Public, 1 Private, per server. Please see our example configurations for more details.
Please ensure that the container node does not have any kind of source/destination filtering on it’s private network interface. If this is not possible, you will need to set calico_network_ipip to true in your inventory.yml file.
Typically if you have your own L2 network, this won’t be a problem. Where this typically is an issue is in cloud environments, at which case you will need to check if you can disable that. Falling back to ip-in-ip tunneling is possible, but not recommended for production environments. Most of the larger cloud providers will allow you to do this. Please contact us if you need assistance.
For clusters (3+ container nodes), we will also require a Floating IP Address. We will use arp to announce that ip on one of the 3 nodes, and handle failover automatically through corosync and pacemaker.
If you do not want a floating IP, or are unable to allocate one, then please set enable_floating_ip: false and floating_ip: to the IP of first node, in your inventory.yml file.
Disk Setup¶
If you have the option to select the partition layout for the container nodes, please place most of your disk storage at /var/lib/docker. You can skip a dedicated /home partition, as this is not used in our environment.
Alternatively, create a single / partition with all available disk space.
Example Disk Layout
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda 100G 3.5G 96GB 1% /
/dev/sdb 1.5T 14G 1.5T 1% /var/lib/docker
/dev/sdc 487M 94M 368M 21% /boot
Minimum Server Requirements¶
Here are our minimum requirements. If you plan to have customers in your environment running production workloads, we recommend you review our example configurations for better guidance on what we recommend for your cluster.
Tip
All CPU Cores should be newer x86 2Ghz+ Intel or AMD processors.
| Name | CPU | Memory | Disk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Controller | 4 Cores | 8 GB | 50 GB |
| Container Node | 4 Cores | 8 GB | 50 GB |
Next Step: Preparing Installation Resources