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Category: Containers

Running Apache Kafka On Kubernetes

Published 2018-08-10 by Kevin Feasel

Rohit Bakhshi walks us through how to install Kafka on a Kubernetes cluster:

Now available on GitHub in developer preview are open-source Helm Chart deployment templates for Confluent Platform components. These templates enable developers to quickly provision Apache Kafka, Apache ZooKeeper, Confluent Schema Registry, Confluent REST Proxy, and Kafka Connect on Kubernetes, using official Confluent Platform Docker images.

Helm is an open-source packaging tool that helps you install applications and services on Kubernetes. Helm uses a packaging format called charts. A chart is a collection of YAML templates that describe a related set of Kubernetes resources.

For stateful components like Kafka and ZooKeeper, the Helm Charts use both StatefulSets to provide an identity to each pod in the form of an ordinal index, and Persistent Volumes that are always mounted for the pod. For stateless components, like REST Proxy, the Helm Charts utilize Deployments instead to provide an identity to each pod. Each component’s charts utilize Services to provide access to each pod.

Read on for more.

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SSL Provider Error: 31 With SQL Server In Docker

Published 2018-08-07 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski walks us through fixing a connection error:

I recently bought a Dell XPS 13 running Ubuntu 16.04 and ran into an issue when connecting SQL Operations Studio (version 0.31.4) to SQL 2017 CU9 running in a docker container. Other people seem to encountering this issue as well so am posting it so that it may be of some help to someone in the future.

The error generated was: –

System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException (0x80131904): A connection was successfully established with the server, but then an error occurred during the pre-login handshake. (provider: SSL Provider, error: 31)

The full error can be viewed here

Read on for the solution.

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SQL Server On Containers Q&A

Published 2018-08-06 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino walks us through questions he received after his PASS marathon session on SQL Server and containers:

  • How do SQL Containers work with High Availability and Disaster Recovery?

  • Backups and data persistency are primary concerns here. You still need to care and feed for your SQL Server databases just as if they were platformed on a full operating system. For HA, Microsoft has some guidance on how to use Kubernetes to provide HA services to your SQL Server containers here. What I want you to think about when using containers for SQL Server is deploying a new container is VERY fast. We want to be able to persist the data and be able to stand up a new container and mount our data inside that container. Using this technique we can restore SQL Services very quickly with low RTO. That itself is an interesting way to provide HA services without any additional technologies.

Read on for more Q&A and check out Anthony’s presentation.

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Connecting GitHub To Azure Container Registry

Published 2018-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski automates the generation of SQL Server Docker images in Azure Container Registry, generating a new image with each GitHub repo check-in:

Fantastic, one build task created! How easy was that??

Let’s test by running: –

az acr build-task run --registry TestContainerRegistry01 --name buildsqlimage

And the progress of the build task can be monitored: –

az acr build-task logs --registry TestContainerRegistry01

Andrew gives us the step-by-step details, so check it out.

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Deploying SQL Server Code Using Jenkins

Published 2018-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Adkin has started a series on continuous integration of SQL Server databases with Jenkins and Docker:

The mainstay of my presentation material this year has been my deck on continuous integration, Docker and Jenkins. For people who have not had the chance to see this presentation or have seen it and wanted to get some more context around it, I have written this first in a series of posts. Much, in fact just about all of the material in this post features in other posts on my blog. The aim of this set of posts is to present the material in a more digestible manner for people who might not be fully fully familiar with Docker and Jenkins.

This first post will cover an introduction to Jenkins and use of the “Sidecar pattern” for deploying DACPACs to. Subsequent posts will expand on this to include:

  • Multi branch build pipelines
  • Parallelism
  • Unit testing with tSQLt
  • The management of database state via Docker volumes

Many people in the SQL Server community have displayed a great interest in containers, only to be left scratching their heads thinking “Well, that is nice, but what can I practically use them for ?”. In my humble opinion, spinning up SQL Server inside a container as a deployment target for a continuous integration pipeline, is one of the, if not the best ways to leverage SQL Server and Docker.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

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Deplaying A Container On Azure

Published 2018-05-25 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski shows us how to deploy an Azure Container Instance:

The code should be fairly self explanatory. I’m using the username and password created earlier to access the ACR and am then spin up a container from the sqlserverlinuxagent:latest image. The container has 2 CPUs and 4GB of memory available to it and it will be listening on a public IP address on port 1433 (be very careful with this).

At the time of writing, the only option available for ip-address is public, hopefully further options will be available soon. I will update this blog if/when that happens.

Read on for a demo.

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Multi-Layered Security With Docker Containers

Published 2018-05-23 by Kevin Feasel

Jessie Frazelle points out the advancements in security that Docker has made over the past couple of years:

Container runtimes have security layers defined by Seccomp, Apparmor, kernel namespaces, cgroups, capabilities, and an unprivileged Linux user. All the layers don’t perfectly overlap, but a few do.

Let’s go over some of the ones that do overlap. I could do them all, but I would be here all day. The mount syscall is prevented by the default Apparmor profile, default Seccomp profile, and CAP_SYS_ADMIN. This is a neat example as it is literally three layers. Wow.

Everyone’s favorite thing to complain about in containers or to prove that they know something is creating a fork bomb. Well this is actually easily preventable. With the PID cgroup you can set a max number of processes per container.

Interesting reading from an insider.

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Docker Containers For Multiple Versions Of SQL Server

Published 2018-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell shows us how to create Docker containers for multiple versions of SQL Server running on the same machine:

I want to show the two modules running against a number of SQL Versions so I have installed

  • 2 Domain Controllers
  • 2 SQL 2017 instances on Windows 2016 with an Availability Group and WideWorldImporters database
  • 1 Windows 2016 jump box with all the programmes I need
  • 1 Windows 2016 with containers

using a VSTS build and this set of ARM templates and scripts

I wanted to create containers running SQL2017, SQL2016, SQL2014 and SQL2012 and restore versions of the AdventureWorks database onto each one.

Rob shows how to do this all via Powershell so you can automate the process.

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