⚠️ Discontinued / No longer maintained. This stuff may still work... or not...

At Codaisseur we want to provide a Heroku like environment for students. We <3 Deis Workflow as do our students, as you can see in this picture.

We use Rails a lot, and PostgreSQL, so we needed an easy way for students to set up their apps despite the fact that Deis does not provide a PostgreSQL service for them like Heroku does. This manager app takes care of that.

It also has a few other of our favorite services:

• Redis
• MongoDB
• Memcached

• A working Deis workflow cluster on k8s
• Helm installed and set up
• Deis client installed and set up

• Create a file called settings.yaml and set variables you would like to change. See Supported Values section below.
• Generate a SECRET_KEY_BASE token for the Rails Services API: docker run --rm quay.io/codaisseur/alea-controller rails secret and put it in your settings.yaml:
• Set up SSL for the Controller Ingress (see below)
• Add the Alea Helm repo: helm repo add alea https://storage.googleapis.com/alea-charts
• Install Alea in the services namespace, using your settings.yaml: helm install alea/alea --namespace=services --name alea --values=settings.yaml
• Wait for the stack to be provisioned, then get the IP for the controller ingress: kubectl -n services get ing. Create an A-record for you DNS to point to whatever you set for the controller.domain setting to be.
• Check out the Usage section below to start using the services in your Deis apps!

# settings.yaml

mongo:
  dbRootPassword: "verysecret"
  dbUser: "myuser"
  dbPassword: "verysecret2"

postgres:
  password: "supersecret"

controller:
  secretKeyBase: "4e613db..."
  hostname: services.mydomain.com

The Alea Controller Ingress needs an SSL certificate. To set this up, create a yaml file, controller-ssl.yaml, and put in the following:

# controller-ssl.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: controller-ssl-cert
  namespace: services
type: Opaque
data:
  tls.crt: LS0tLS1CR...
  tls.key: LS0tLS1CR...

Put in your crt and key bas64 encoded:

$ cat certificate-file.crt
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
/ * your SSL certificate here */
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
/* any intermediate certificates */
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
$ cat certificate-file.crt | base64 -e
LS0tLS1CRUdJTiBDRVJUSUZJQ0FURS0tLS0tCi8gKiB5b3VyIFNTTCBjZXJ0aWZpY2F0ZSBoZXJlICovCi0tLS0tRU5EIENFUlRJRklDQVRFLS0tLS0KLS0tLS1CRUdJTiBDRVJUSUZJQ0FURS0tLS0tCi8qIGFueSBpbnRlcm1lZGlhdGUgY2VydGlmaWNhdGVzICovCi0tLS0tRU5EIENFUlRJRklDQVRFLS0tLS0K
$ cat certificate.key
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
/* your unencrypted private key here */
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
$ cat certificate.key | base64 -e
LS0tLS1CRUdJTiBSU0EgUFJJVkFURSBLRVktLS0tLQovKiB5b3VyIHVuZW5jcnlwdGVkIHByaXZhdGUga2V5IGhlcmUgKi8KLS0tLS1FTkQgUlNBIFBSSVZBVEUgS0VZLS0tLS0K

Then create the Secret:

kubectl create -f controller-ssl.yaml

When you are setting up a new app that needs to use PostgreSQL, you can create a database by POSTing to the Manager app's Postgres endpoint:

curl -XPOST https://services.yourdomain.com/postgres_databases

This will return your new DATABASE_URL:

DATABASE_URL=postgres://kaya:UQjSz3Z-4jKxfMaMcrRr@postgres-pooling-service.services:5432/navigate_alarm

Similarly, we can get a REDIS_URL for new apps:

curl -XPOST https://services.yourdomain.com/redis_services

Which will return something like:

REDIS_URL=redis://redis-slave.services:26379/index_bus

And unsurprisingly this works the same for MongoDB:

curl -XPOST https://services.yourdomain.com/mongodb_services

Which will return something like:

MONGODB_URL=mongodb://mandymcdermott:bjDsasmjoCb-kHZBGrwZ@mongodb-service.services:27017/bypass_interface

Memcached is configured with servers and a namespace:

curl -XPOST https://services.yourdomain.com/memcached_services

Which will return something like:

MEMCACHED_SERVERS=memcached-1.services,memcached-2.services MEMCACHED_NAMESPACE=copy_driver

This stack is not production ready yet. We are actively using this with our students at Codaisseur, who create 100s of apps every week or so, but this needs a lot more testing to be safe. Our plan is to add automated backup services for each service in the near future. See also the roadmap below, and let us know in the issues if there's anything you'd like to see or if you experience any trouble.

• We will add more services as we go, like:
  • √ PostgreSQL
  • √ Redis
  • √ MongoDB
  • √ Memcached
• √ Create Helm charts for the entire cluster
• Create automated backup services for each service

Let us know which services you are missing and we will try to add them.

Feel free to help us out or leave any feedback in the issues :)

• 2016-07-26 Initial project with PostgreSQL service
• 2016-07-31 Added Redis, MongoDB, and Memcached services
• 2016-08-08 Fixed MongoDB issues, running from Dockerfile now
• 2016-10-24 Moved away from Stolon and to a setup by @paunin with pgpool2
• 2016-10-24 Moved away from Helm Classic and to the new Helm
• 2016-12-05 RELEASE 0.2.0 Moved back to Stolon and upgraded Redis cluster

• The Deis Team for the awesomeness that is our own PaaS!
• The Bitnami team for their awesome list of helm charts
• The Storint.lab team for their super duper HA Postgres solution Stolon