Overview

The motivations for the new layout are related to bringing more flexibility to users and part of the process to Integrating Kubebuilder and Operator SDK.

What was changed

• The deploy directory was replaced with the config directory including a new layout of Kubernetes manifests files:

  • CRD manifests in deploy/crds/ are now in config/crd/bases
  • CR manifests in deploy/crds/ are now in config/samples
  • Controller manifest deploy/operator.yaml is now in config/manager/manager.yaml
  • RBAC manifests in deploy are now in config/rbac/

• build/Dockerfile is moved to Dockerfile in the project root directory

• The molecule/ directory is now more aligned to Ansible and the new Layout

What is new

Scaffolded projects now use:

• kustomize to manage Kubernetes resources needed to deploy your operator
• A Makefile with helpful targets for build, test, and deployment, and to give you flexibility to tailor things to your project’s needs
• Updated metrics configuration using kube-auth-proxy, a --metrics-addr flag, and kustomize-based deployment of a Kubernetes Service and prometheus operator ServiceMonitor

How to migrate

The easy migration path is to a project from the scratch and let the tool scaffold the new layout. Then, add your customizations and implementations. See below for an example.

Creating a new project

In Kubebuilder-style projects, CRD groups are defined using two different flags (--group and --domain).

When we initialize a new project, we need to specify the domain that all APIs in our project will share, so before creating the new project, we need to determine which domain we’re using for the APIs in our existing project.

To determine the domain, look at the spec.group field in your CRDs in the deploy/crds directory.

The domain is everything after the first DNS segment. Using cache.example.com as an example, the --domain would be example.com.

So let’s create a new project with the same domain (example.com):

mkdir memcached-operator
cd memcached-operator
operator-sdk init --plugins=ansible --domain=example.com

Now that we have our new project initialized, we need to recreate each of our APIs. Using our API example from earlier (cache.example.com), we’ll use cache for the --group flag.

For --version and --kind, we use spec.versions[0].name and spec.names.kind, respectively.

For each API in the existing project, run:

operator-sdk create api \
    --group=cache \
    --version=v1 \
    --kind=Memcached

Running the above command creates an empty roles/<kind>. We can copy over the content of our old roles/<kind> to the new one.

Migrating your Custom Resource samples

Update the CR manifests in config/samples with the values of the CRs in your existing project which are in deploy/crds/<group>_<version>_<kind>_cr.yaml In our example the config/samples/cache_v1alpha1_memcached.yaml will look like:

apiVersion: cache.example.com/v1alpha1
kind: Memcached
metadata:
  name: memcached-sample
spec:
  # Add fields here
  size: 3

Migrating watches.yaml

Update the watches.yaml file with your roles/playbooks and check if you have custom options in the watches.yaml file of your existing project. If so, update the new watches.yaml file to match.

In our example, we will replace # FIXME: Specify the role or playbook for this resource. with our previous role and it will look like:

---
# Use the 'create api' subcommand to add watches to this file.
- version: v1alpha1
  group: cache.example.com
  kind: Memcached
  role: memcached
# +kubebuilder:scaffold:watch

NOTE: Do not remove the +kubebuilder:scaffold:watch marker. It allows the tool to update the watches file when new APIs are created.

Migrating your Molecule tests

If you are using Molecule in your project will be required to port the tests for the new layout.

See that default structure changed from:

├── cluster
│   ├── converge.yml
│   ├── create.yml
│   ├── destroy.yml
│   ├── molecule.yml
│   ├── prepare.yml
│   └── verify.yml
├── default
│   ├── converge.yml
│   ├── molecule.yml
│   ├── prepare.yml
│   └── verify.yml
├── templates
│   └── operator.yaml.j2
└── test-local
    ├── converge.yml
    ├── molecule.yml
    ├── prepare.yml
    └── verify.yml

To:

├── default
│   ├── converge.yml
│   ├── create.yml
│   ├── destroy.yml
│   ├── kustomize.yml
│   ├── molecule.yml
│   ├── prepare.yml
│   ├── tasks
│   │   └── foo_test.yml
│   └── verify.yml
└── kind
    ├── converge.yml
    ├── create.yml
    ├── destroy.yml
    └── molecule.yml

Ensure that the provisioner.host_vars.localhost has the following host_vars:

....
    host_vars:
      localhost:
        ansible_python_interpreter: '{{ ansible_playbook_python }}'
        config_dir: ${MOLECULE_PROJECT_DIRECTORY}/config
        samples_dir: ${MOLECULE_PROJECT_DIRECTORY}/config/samples
        operator_image: ${OPERATOR_IMAGE:-""}
        operator_pull_policy: ${OPERATOR_PULL_POLICY:-"Always"}
        kustomize: ${KUSTOMIZE_PATH:-kustomize}
...

For more information read the Testing with Molecule.

Checking the Permissions (RBAC)

In your new project, roles are automatically generated in config/rbac/role.yaml. If you modified these permissions manually in deploy/role.yaml in your existing project, you need to re-apply them in config/rbac/role.yaml.

New projects are configured to watch all namespaces by default, so they need a ClusterRole to have the necessary permissions. Ensure that config/rbac/role.yaml remains a ClusterRole if you want to retain the default behavior of the new project conventions.

The following rules were used in earlier versions of anisible-operator to automatically create and manage services and servicemonitors for metrics collection. If your operator’s don’t require these rules, they can safely be left out of the new config/rbac/role.yaml file:

  - apiGroups:
    - monitoring.coreos.com
    resources:
    - servicemonitors
    verbs:
    - get
    - create
  - apiGroups:
    - apps
    resourceNames:
    - memcached-operator
    resources:
    - deployments/finalizers
    verbs:
    - update

Configuring your Operator

If your existing project has customizations in deploy/operator.yaml, they need to be ported to config/manager/manager.yaml. If you are passing custom arguments in your deployment, make sure to also update config/default/auth_proxy_patch.yaml.

Note that the following environment variables are no longer used.

• OPERATOR_NAME is deprecated. It is used to define the name for a leader election config map. Operator authors should begin using --leader-election-id instead.
• POD_NAME has been removed. It was used to enable a particular pod to hold the leader election lock when the Ansible operator used the leader for life mechanism. Ansible operator now uses controller-runtime’s leader with lease mechanism.

Exporting metrics

If you are using metrics and would like to keep them exported you will need to configure it in the config/default/kustomization.yaml. Please see the metrics doc to know how you can perform this setup.

The default port used by the metric endpoint binds to was changed from :8383 to :8080. To continue using port 8383, specify --metrics-addr=:8383 when you start the operator.

Checking the changes

Finally, follow the steps in the “run the Operator” section to verify your project is running.

Note that, you also can troubleshooting by checking the container logs. E.g $ kubectl logs deployment.apps/memcached-operator-controller-manager -n memcached-operator-system -c manager