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VEBA + Knative + k3s on ESXi-Arm

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In response to a customer request to add Arm64 support for our VMware Event Router, I have been spending some more time playing with k3s (lightweight Kubernetes distribution for Arm) running on ESXi-Arm using a Raspberry Pi. Not only was this a good learning experience that exposed to me to the broader Arm ecosystem, which is still maturing but it also took me down several ??️ which got me exploring new tools that I had never used before such as Buildpacks and Docker buildx to name a few.

This past weekend, I was finally successful in setting up our VMware Event Router for Arm using the Knative processor on a k3s cluster using ESXi-Arm running on a Raspberry Pi 4b 8GB model! As of writing this, the following versions were used:

  • Knative Serving v0.20.0
  • Knative Net Contour v0.20.0
  • Knative Eventing v0.20.1
  • RabbitMQ Cluster Operator v0.5.0

In addition, I was able to also convert the Knative python echo function that was originally created by my colleague Michael Gasch and build an Arm64 version of the Knative python echo function which demonstrates the integration of VEBA with the Knative processor connected to a vCenter Server as my event source.

For those interested in just the VMware Event Router Arm64 image, you can access it here and we plan to make that an official image shortly. For those interested in setting up a fully functional Arm deployment of VEBA and Knative processor, you can find the detailed instructions below.

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Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance 1.2.1

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Check out the newest release of the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Demo Appliance Fling which includes the following new features:

  • Support for the latest TKG 1.2.1 release
  • Support for TKG Workload Cluster upgrade workflow from Kubernetes v1.18.10 to v1.19.3
  • Updated embedded Harbor to use self-sign TLS certificate

One of the biggest feature I was excited for in the new TKG 1.2.1 release was support for an external container registry that was configured with a self-signed TLS certificate. Previously, TKG only supported container registries that were configured with a trusted CA signed certificate and that made it difficult for proof of concept/testing but also for environments that were air-gapped.

With previous releases of the TKG Demo Appliance, a valid TLS certificate was acquired from Let's Encrypt (LE) with the help of my good friend Ryan Johnson who owns the domain rainpole.io. The one downside to LE-based certificates is the short expiry period, which is every 90 days. This meant that any TKG Demo Appliance deployed after the expiry would stop functioning due to the certificate no longer being valid. Although I have been able to manage this by updating the appliance roughly every 90 days, usually in-conjunction with new release of TKG, it was less than ideal.

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How to deploy Knative to a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster on both vSphere with Tanzu and TKG Multi-Cloud?

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This weekend I spent some time installing Knative, which is an open source framework that is built on top of Kubernetes. Knative is actually made up of two core components, serving and eventing. This quote from Ram Gopinathan, Principal Technology Architect, T-Mobile really sums up Knative quite nicely:

Knative helps our developers focus on building the business logic rather than worrying about building low-level platform capabilities such as build, deploy, autoscaling, monitoring, and observability.

There are a number of tutorials online for setting up Knative, most of which using Kubernetes in Docker (KinD) for easy local development. Since I have been spending quite a bit of time lately with both our vSphere with Tanzu and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Multi-Cloud solution, which both support deploying conformant and production grade Kubernetes (K8s) Clusters called a TKG Guest Cluster, I figure I might as well learn how to install Knative using these infrastructures.

The instructions below will be focus on deploying the Knative serving components. Once you have that setup, it is easy to deploy the eventing components which you can follow the official Knative documentation.

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