Install Robin storage on GKE
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is a managed Kubernetes service that you can use to deploy and operate containerized applications at scale using Google’s infrastructure. GKE makes it easy to deploy update and manage container based applications & services. GKE isn’t just for stateless applications, rather you can attach persistent storage and even run databases in your cluster.
Robin cloud native storage is a purpose-built container native storage solution that brings advanced data management capabilities to Kubernetes. It provides automated lifecycle management, point in time snapshots, backup and recovery, Enterprise grade data security, snapshots and cloning, QoS guarantee and multi-cloud migration for stateful applications such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Elastic stack, Kafka and Maria DB.
In this Part-I post we will create a GKE cluster with persistent disks and install Robin storage through Google Cloud marketplace. In Part-II post we will look at deploying PostgreSQL on GKE using Helm and using Robin storage.
To create a GKE cluster log in to your google cloud account and select an existing project and then open the cloud shell window. We will now create a GKE cluster that meets the pre-requisites for installing Robin storage. The pre-requisites are Ubuntu OS image for the container and a minimum of 4 vCPUs and 4 GB memory per node. In addition to this the cluster also need access to GCP disks and the storage APIs. The command here creates two node GKE clusters in the us-central1-a region. We are using the machine type e2-highcpu-4 to meet the vCPUs and memory requirements and Ubuntu_Containerd OS image. Once you run the command it may take a few minutes for the cluster to be created and ready to use. Once the cluster is ready you should be able to see it in your Google Cloud console.
Let us now install Robin storage to bring advanced data management capabilities to GKE. On your Google Cloud console click on the marketplace tab on the left hand side of the menu. Search for Robin storage in the marketplace and click on the Robin storage app in the search results. Once on the Robin storage page click on purchase plan button (30 days free trial) to enable Robin storage on your Google cloud platform account. If you already have a active plan then click on configure in the configuration screen.
In the configure screen, select the recently created cluster and let’s set the size equal to 100 for the storage disks field and type YES in the cluster requirements text box as we know our cluster meets the pre-requisites. Now click on deploy to install Robin storage on your GKE cluster. It may take a few minutes to complete the deployment.
Once the deployment is complete you should be taken to application details page where you can see the Robin storage application.
Verify all components status are OK or Running.
Once the installation is complete you can get details about robin cluster by running the following kubectl command.
kubectl describe robinclusters
The resulting output should have the connect command to connect with Robin.
Copy the command and run it to connect with Robin. After connecting to Robin container you can login as admin user with the default password. Once you are connected to the Robin container you can verify the installation by running the “robin host list” command. The installation is complete once all the nodes become ready and online.
At this point you can start deploying data applications on robin. With this we have concluded how to setup GKE cluster and install Robin storage to deploy data applications on GKE.
