Running Gaffer on Kubernetes

Warning

Gaffer Kubernetes is not currently up to date. You will need to use a version of Kubernetes <= 1.25 for deployments. The information here is subject to change in future releases.

Gaffer's Open Container Initiative (OCI) images mean it is also possible to deploy via kubernetes to give an alternative scalable deployment. This guide will assume the reader is familiar with general usage of kubernetes, further reading is available in the official documentation.

Note

All the files needed to get started using Gaffer in Kubernetes are contained in the kubernetes sub-folder of the gaffer-docker repository.

Pre-requisites

To deploy container images on a kubernetes cluster, you'll need the following:

A Kubernetes cluster (local or remote)
kubectl
helm
An ingress controller running (e.g. NGINX)

You will also need to install a container management engine such as, containerd via Docker or Podman, to run and manage your containers.

Adding the Gaffer Helm Charts

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes which uses a format called charts. A chart is a collection of files that describe a set of Kubernetes resources, essentially what images to run where and how much resources they can access.

The Helm charts for Gaffer can be found in the following places in the gaffer-docker repository:

These charts can be accessed by cloning our repository or by using Helm to add the gaffer-docker repo:

helm repo add gaffer-docker https://gchq.github.io/gaffer-docker

Using Custom Images

You may wish to create custom images that have configuration or additional libraries baked in.

The Docker deployment guide has information on how to create new images but you will need a way of making the custom images visible to the Kubernetes cluster. Once visible you can switch them out.

Create a custom-images.yaml file with the following contents:

# Add custom REST API image
api:
  image:
    repository: custom-rest
    tag: latest

# Add custom Accumulo image
accumulo:
  image:
    repository: custom-gaffer-accumulo
    tag: latest

To switch them run:

helm upgrade my-graph gaffer-docker/gaffer -f custom-images.yaml --reuse-values