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Retro DOS Games on Kubernetes

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Over the weekend I discovered this really cool Github project by Paolo Mainardi called additronk8s which is a retro DOS game engine (using DOSBox) built as a Kubernetes (K8s) custom controller and implemented in Javascript. Having spent quite a bit of time last year building out our VMworld 2019 demo which ran a number of MSDOS games on ESX 3.0 running on VMware Cloud on AWS, I definitely had to give this project a try!

In addition to having some fun playing with K8s, this solution was also quite interesting from the techniques that were used, here is a description from Paolo's own words:

One of the goal of this project was to use just Kubernetes API without any external dependency (neither the storage), in fact is noteworthy that ConfigMaps are (ab)used as a persistent storage layer, using a simple technique of split/merge parts of files to save the games.

AdditronK8S Scheme
After poking around the repository, I found that it was not very intuitive to get started. In fact, it took me some time to figure out everything and lots of trial/error. I eventually got everything working and successfully deployed several DOS games to my Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster which I had running in my homelab. Below are the detailed instructions on how to quickly get this solution stood up which just requires a vanilla K8s deployment.

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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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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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