Month: February 2015

Mount an external EBS volume in AWS

Josh Reichardt 10 Comments

Creating and attaching external volumes is one of those things in administration that is really nice to know how to do but for me is also one that doesn’t happen every day so it is really easy to forget how to do which makes it a little bit more painful, especially with deadlines and people watching over your shoulder.  So, having said that, I think it is probably worth writing a post about how to do it because it happens just enough that I have trouble getting everything straight, and I’m sure others run in to this as well, so that’s what I will be writing about today.

There is  good documentation for how to do this but there are a lot of separate steps so consolidating the components might be helpful to readers who stumble across this.  I’m sure there are other ways to accomplish this but I don’t think it is necessary to cover everything here.

Create your “floating volume”

This step is straight forward.  In the AWS EC2 console choose the type of volume this will be (SSD or magnetic), availability zone, and any other options here.

create ebs volume

After your volume has been created you will want to attach it to an instance.  This part is important because the changes could break your OS volume if you write to your fstab file incorrectly.  In this example I am choosing to attach the EBS volume as /dev/xvdf, but you could name it differently if it corresponds to your setup.

attach ebs volume

After the volume has been mounted you can check that it has been picked up by the OS by either checking the /dev directory or by running fdisk -l and looking for the size of the disk you just attached.

It is worth pointing out that all of the steps in the AWS console can alternatively be done with the aws-cli tool.  It is probably easier but for the sake of time and illustration I am leaving those steps out.  Feel free to reach out if you are interested in the cli tool and I can update this post.

If you run fdisk -l you will notice that the device is empty, so you will need to format the disk.  In this instance I am formatting the disk as ext4.  So use the following command to format it.

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/xvdf

After the volume has been formatted you can mount it to your OS.

Attaching the volume

sudo mkdir /data
sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/xvdf /data

If you need to resize the filesystem for whatever reason, you can use the resize2fs command.

sudo resize2fs <mount point>
sudo resize2fs /dev/xvdf

Here you will create the directory (if it doesn’t already exist) to mount the volume to and then mount it.  At this point it would be fine to be done if you just needed temporary access to the storage on this device.  But if you want your mount to persist and to survive a reboot then you just add an entry to your /etc/fstab file to make sure the /data directory gets the volume mounted to it after a reboot.  Something like the following would work.

/dev/xvdf       /data   ext4    defaults,nobootwait        0       0

The entry is pretty easy to follow but may be confusing for those who are not familiar with how fstab works.  I will break down the various components here.

The first parameter is the location of the volume (/dev/xvdf) and is referred to as the file_system field.

The second parameter specifies where to mount the volume to (/data) and is referred to as the dir field.

The third field is the type.  This is where you specify the file system type or device to be mounted.  If you didn’t format this volume previously it would crate problems for OS when it tried to load in your volume from this file.

The fourth section is the options for the mount.  Here, the defaults,nobootwait section is very important.  If you don’t have the nobootwait option specified here then your OS could potentially hang on boot up if it couldn’t find the specified volume, so this option helps escape it if there are any problems.

The fifth field is to either enable or disable the dump option.  Unless you are familiar with or use the dump command you will almost always set this to 0.

The last section is the pass section.  This simply tells the OS if it should run an fsck or not on this volume.  Here I have it set to 0 so it doesn’t get checked but for OS volumes, this could be important to turn on.

Next steps

There are many more things you can do with fstab so if you are interested in other options for how to mount volumes you can look at the fstab documentation for more insights and information.

If you ever wanted to float this volume to another host it would be easy to do, and would not require any new or special formatting since this was already taken care of here.  The steps would looks similar to the following.

  • Unmount volume from current OS
  • Remove entry in /etc/fstab for volume mount
  • Detach mount in AWS console from current OS
  • Attach mount to new OS
  • Mount volume manually in new OS to test if it works
  • If the mount works add a new entry in /etc/fstab
  • Done

So that’s pretty much it.  Hopefully this is useful for everybody.

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Kubernetes resize and rolling updates

Josh Reichardt 1 Comment

If you haven’t heard of or used Kubernetes yet, I highly recommend taking a look (see the link below).  I won’t take too much time here today to talk about the Kubernetes project because there is just too much to cover.  Instead I will be writing a series of posts about how to work with Kubernetes and share some tricks and tips that I have discovered in my experiences so far with the tool.  Since the project is still very young and moving incredibly quickly, the best place to get information is either the IRC channel (#google-containers), the mailing list, or their github project.  Please go look at the github project if you are new to Kubernetes, or are interested in learning more about it, especially their docs and examples sections.

As I said, updates and progress have been extremely fast paced, so it isn’t uncommon for things in the Kubernetes project to seem obselete before they have even been implemented.  For example, the command line tool for interacting with a Kubernetes cluster has already changed faces a few times, which was confusing to me when I first started out.  Kubecfg is on the way out and the project maintainers are working on removing old references to it.  On the flip side, the kubectl command is maturing quite nicely and will be around for awhile, along with the subcommand that I will be describing.

Now that I have all the basic background stuff out of the way; the version of kubectl I am using for this demonstration is v0.9.1.  If you just discovered Kubernetes or have been using kubecfg (as explained above) you will want to make sure to get more familiar with kubectl because it is the preferred tool going forward, at least at this point.

There are a few handy subcommands that come baked in to the kubectl command.  The first is the resize command.  This command allows you to scale the number of running containers being managed by Kubernetes up or down on the fly.  Obviously this can be really powerful!  The syntax is pretty straight forward and below I have an example listed.

kubectl resize –current-replicas=6 –replicas=0 rc test-rc

The –current-replicas argument is optional, the –replicas defines the *desired* number of replicas to have runing, rc specifies this is a replication controller, and finally, test-rc is the name of the replication controller to scale.   After you scale your replication controller you can check out the status quickly via the following command.

kubectl get pod

Another handy tool to have when working with Kubernetes is the ability to deploy new images as a rolling update.

 kubectl rollingupdate test-rc -f test-rc-2.yml –update-period=”10s”

The rollingupdate command takes a few arguments.  The first is the name of the current replication controller that you would like to update.  The second is to replace it with the yml file of the new replication controller and the third optional argument is the –update-period, which allows a user to override the default time that it takes to spin up a new container and spin down an old.

Below is an example of what your test-rc-2.yml file may look like.

kind: ReplicationController
apiVersion: v1beta1
id: test-rc-2
namespace: default
desiredState:
 replicas: 1
 replicaSelector:
   name: test-rc
   version: v2
 podTemplate:
 labels:
   name: test-rc
   version: v2
 desiredState:
 manifest:
 version: v1beta1
 id: test-rc
 containers:
   - name: test-image
   image: test/test:new-tag
   imagePullPolicy: PullAlways
 ports:
   - name: test-port
   containerPort: 8080

There are a few important things to notice.  The first is that the id must be unique, it can’t be a name that is already in use by another replication controller.  All of the label names should remain the same except for the version.  The version is used to signify the new replication controller is a running a new docker image.  The version number should be unique, which will help keep track of which image version is running.

Another thing to note.  If your original replication controller did not contain a unique key (like version) then you will need to update the original replication controller first, adding a unique key, before attempting to run the rolling update.

If both replication controllers don’t have the same format you will get an error similar to this.

test-rc.yml must specify a matching key with non-equal value in Selector for <selector name>

So that’s pretty much it for now.  I will revisit this post again in the future as new flags and subcommands are added to kubectl for managing and updating replication controllers.  I also plan on writing a few more posts about other aspects and areas of kubectl and running Kubernetes, so please check back soon!

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