titan

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Prerequisites
• Getting started
  • Delivery cluster
  • Repository access
  • Accessing the UIs
  • Custom resources
• Using the CLI

Introduction

Titan is a sandbox for deploying Prometheus, Thanos, and Grafana to K8s with ArgoCD.

Prerequisites

Titan assumes you're running on a Mac, and have the following installed. If you don't have them, you can install them with Homebrew:

Service	Installation
Docker	brew install docker
Kind	brew install kind
Kubectl	brew install kubectl
Helm	brew install helm
ArgoCD	brew install argocd

Getting started

1. Create a fork of this repo, and clone it to your local machine.
2. Open a terminal on the cloned directory and run ./titan init.
3. When you're done, run ./titan kill to tear down the clusters.

Titan will create local Kind clusters for management and delivery, and deploy ArgoCD to the management cluster. It will also deploy Prometheus, Thanos, and Grafana to the delivery cluster.

Delivery cluster

ArgoCD needs access to the delivery cluster, so it can deploy the applications. To do this, titan uses a kind config file to create a cluster with an apiServerAddress set to the host machine's IP address.

As an added convenience, the build script will attempt to detect your IP address, using the en0 and en1 interfaces, and update the config for you. If it can't detect your IP address, you can set it manually in the delivery/cluster.yaml file.

Repository access

ArgoCD needs access to the repo. GitOps works by pulling the manifests from a git repository, and applying them to the cluster. If you're happy with the manifests in this repo, you can leave them as-is. If you want to make changes, you'll need to fork the repo, and edit the manifests to point to your fork (use https, not ssh):

File	Field
management/manifests/application.yaml	repoURL
management/manifests/repository.yaml	url
delivery/manifests/shared.yaml	repoURL

Accessing the UIs

Once the clusters are up, you can access the UIs. You'll need to forward the ports for each service. First, set the context for the cluster you want to access:

$ kubectl config use-context kind-{delivery|management}

Then, forward the ports (in separate terminals):

$ kubectl port-forward svc/{service} -n {namespace} {ports}

List of values to pass into kubectl port-forward:

Service	Namespace	Ports
argocd-server	argocd	8080:443
grafana	monitoring	3000:3000
prometheus	monitoring	9090:9090
thanos-query	monitoring	9090:9090

Custom resources

Helm doesn't support upgrading CRDs in the default /crds directory, so titan uses braid to manage the CRDs for ArgoCD and Prometheus externally. To update the CRDs, run the following:

$ braid update # and commit the changes
$ kubectl config use-context kind-{management|delivery}
$ kubectl apply -f {management|delivery}/shared/crds

Using the CLI

Titan provides a cli to help you raise and lower the stack. It's a simple wrapper around kind, kubectl, and helm, so you can use those tools directly if you prefer.

Command	Description
./titan init	Create clusters and deploy apps.
./titan kill	Tear down clusters.
./titan help	Print help text.