TLDR;
Recently, we developed the gardener-extension-mwe, which serves as a minimal working example for Gardener extensions.
If you are only interested in the code, go and checkout the repository on github.
If you want to learn more, keep on reading.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Starting the development of new Gardener extensions can be challenging.
As the Gardener documentation is fairly complex and driven by the history of the project, getting into the overall concepts is not easy.
Moreover, code examples for Gardener extensions reside in separate Git repositories lacking documentation.
However, early in March 2022 the gardener-extension-shoot-networking-filter was published, which comes at a more beginner friendly level than the e.g. the cloud-provider extensions.
In particular, it extends Shoot clusters by the use of managed resources, which might be more straight-forward than the interaction with a cloud service provider as performed by e.g. the gardener-extension-provider-aws.
Thus, gardener-extension-shoot-networking-filter provides a reasonable starting point for new developments, which target at automated deployments into Shoot clusters.
However, going beyond the identification of a starting point, it makes sense to take a closer look at the concepts for extension development.
In the extension directory of the Gardener Git repository, we find several Go-packages defining interfaces, which can be implemented by extension controllers.
Put simply, we can search for files matching pkg/controller/*/actuator.go, in order to find interfaces for controllers acting on the corresponding resources.
E.g., if our controller defines a (golang)-type -- called actuator -- implementing the interface defined in pkg/controller/extension/actuator.go, the controller will reconcile resources of type *extensionsv1alpha1.Extension.
Consequently, the controller will take care for all the steps we define in the Reconcile method of the actuator, when Extension resources are updated.
Of course, there might be more complex scenarios where reconciling Extension resources would be insufficient.
In these cases, other interfaces like e.g. defined in pkg/controller/infrastructure/actuator.go would need to be implemented.
However, these cases lie beyond the scope of this blog post.
Next, we will dive into some basic workflows for Gardener extension development.
Basic workflows
In software engineering, it is reasonable to develop on a local machine with a controllable toolchain.
As already mentioned above, Gardener extensions are implemented in Go.
Therefore, let's identify a few requirements for the development:
- An installation of Go
- A text editor, which (optionally) supports gopls
- A Go debugger, which is most likely to be Delve
- A Gardener development environment. This can be setup by
- Running Gardener locally (also checkout #5548, if you are running on Linux)
- Setting up a development Gardener on some cloud infrastructure. This definitely comes closer to the real world scenario your extension will eventually live in.
The block diagram below depicts the overall setup including the requirements from above.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Development Computer │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ │
│ ┌──────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │ - Your toolchain │ │
│ └──────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
│ │
│ ┌────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐ │
│ │Kubeconfigs │ │Your code │ │
│ └──┬──────┬──┘ └────────┬─────┘ │
│ │ │ │ │
└────────┼──────┼────────────────────┼─────────┘
│ │ │
│ │apply │
apply │ │resources │reconcile
resources│ │ │resources
│ └──────────────────┐ │
│ │ │
│ │ │
▼ ▼ ▼
┌─────────────────┐ ┌─────────────────┐
│ Garden Cluster │ │ Seed Cluster │
├─────────────────┤ ├─────────────────┤
│- Project │ │- Extension │
│- Seed │ │- Controller │
│- Shoot │ │- ... │
│- ... │ │ │
└─────────────────┘ └─────────────────┘
As you can see, the code for the extension controller is running on your local development machine, and reconciles resources, such as Extension resources, in the Seed cluster.
Of course, you will not have dedicated clusters for the Garden cluster and Seed cluster, when running Gardener locally.
However, the overall buidling blocks stay conceptually the same.
Once these requirements are met, you are good to go for your first steps with Gardener extensions.
Wait! I have to setup an entire Gardener, if I want to rapidly prototype an extension controller?
Yes and No. Depending on your development/test case, it might be reasonable to "fake" a Gardener environment on a vanilla Kubernetes cluster. We will get to this development case below.
For rock solid testing, however, you most probably need a real world Gardener environment.
The mininal working example
As of May 2022, we provide a Minimal Working Example (MWE) for gardener extensions.
Of course, this example did not come out of nowhere.
Therefore, we review the development process and break the example down to its components in the following:
Taking a look at other extensions, it is observed that we need some boiler plate code for running our controller, so that it works together with all the other Gardener components.
For the MWE, we collected the relevant files and adjusted them to our needs.
Thus, we can have a look at the cmd directory of the gardener-extension-mwe and find a simple structure with 3 files, which are responsible for starting our controller and ensuring that it acts on the defined resources.
cmd
└── gardener-extension-mwe
├── app
│ ├── app.go
│ └── options.go
└── main.go
If you want to start the development of a new extension, you do not need to worry too much about these files.
Most probably, you can simple copy them over, and adjust some variables to your needs.
Actually, we also copied these files from the gardener-extension-shoot-networking-filter and adjusted them to the needs of the MWE.
Given that we have the boilerplate code in the cmd directory available now, we can go ahead and define a type which implements an actuator interface.
For this, we need the files in the pkg directory.
Lets take a look at the structure:
pkg
└── controller
└── lifecycle
├── actuator.go
└── add.go
Also here, we find only two files, and the implementation of the interface is located in actuator.go.
This is the place where most of the magic of your new controller happens.
In the case of the MWE, the actuator will only output logs, when Extension resources are reconciled.
Obviously, all code is written in Go and consequently we will also need to pull in some dependencies.
For this, we need the files go.mod and go.sum.
Typically, the source code of the dependencies is also committed to the repository, which comes at advantages and downsides.
The main advantage is that all code needed for building an application is available in the repository.
On the other hand, committing several 1000s lines of code during vendoring clutters the commit history of the repository.
Therefore, we only provide the files mentioned above in the initial commit of the MWE and perform the vendoring (by running go mod vendor) in another commit.
At this state of the repository, we can already start and go the first steps with our new controller in a vanilla Kubernetes cluster.
Rapid prototyping on a Kubernetes cluster (tested with version 1.22.6)
Assuming you have read the basic workflows section, we are ready to dive into the exemplary development techniques.
So let's fetch the code and setup the repository:
git clone https://github.com/23technologies/gardener-extension-mwe.git
cd gardener-extension-mwe
git checkout 3c238bd # checkout the commit containing first vendoring
mkdir dev
cp PATH-TO/KUBECONFIG.yaml dev/kubeconfig.yaml
Now, we can already start our controller and should get some output showing that it was started:
go run ./cmd/gardener-extension-mwe --kubeconfig=dev/kubeconfig.yaml --ignore-operation-annotation=true --leader-election=false
However, we will not observe any other output, since the controller is still freewheeling.
Remember, reconciliation will be triggered on Extension resources.
As our vanilla Kubernetes cluster does not know anything about Extension resources yet, we will have to "fake" the Gardener environment.
In other Gardener extensions, we find resources for a "fake" Gardener setup in the example directory.
Therefore, we prepared the example directory in another commit.
Let's check it out:
Open a new terminal pane and navigate to your repository and go for
git checkout 50f7136 # this commit entails the example directory
export KUBECONFIG=dev/kubeconfig.yaml
kubectl apply -f example/10-fake-shoot-controlplane.yaml
kubectl apply -f example/20-crd-cluster.yaml
kubectl apply -f example/20-crd-extension.yaml
kubectl apply -f example/30-cluster.yaml
Now, the cluster simulates a Gardener environment and we can apply an Extension resource:
kubectl apply -f example/40-extension.yaml
Take another look at the terminal running our controller now.
It should have logged a "Hello World" message.
Of course, we can also delete the Extension resource again and the controller will tell us that the Delete method was called.
kubectl delete -f example/40-extension.yaml
As we have the code and a method to trigger its execution available now, we can go ahead for a more interactive approach based on the Delve debugger.
Let's start all over again and run our controller using Delve
dlv debug ./cmd/gardener-extension-mwe -- --kubeconfig=dev/kubeconfig.yaml --ignore-operation-annotation=true --leader-election=false
and we will end up in a commandline with a (dlv) prompt.
Next, we ask dlv to break in the Reconcile method
(dlv) b github.com/23technologies/gardener-extension-mwe/pkg/controller/lifecycle.(*actuator).Reconcile
and continue the execution of the controller
Afterwards, you should observe some output of the controller, again.
However, Delve will not break the execution until the Reconcile method is called.
Thus, we apply the Extension resource once again
kubectl apply -f example/40-extension.yaml
and Delve will stop in the Reconcile method.
Now, you can step through the code, see where it enters code paths pointing into the vendor directory, and inspect the values of certain variables.
Obviously, the amount of variables you can inspect is limited in the MWE, but e.g. we can have a look at the *extensionsv1alpha1.Extension passed to the Reconcile method
(dlv) p ex.ObjectMeta.Name
which should print "mwe".
Generally, this is a great way to approach unknown software, since you will quickly get a feeling for the different components.
Thus, we expect that you can benefit from this workflow, when developing your own extensions.
Even though this approach offers capabilities for rapid prototyping, it is still limited, since we cannot act e.g. on Shoot clusters as available in a real world Gardener.
Therefore, we step into the development in a Gardener environment in the next section.
Development in a real Gardener environment
Developing and testing our extension in a real world Gardener requires a ControllerRegistration resource in the Garden cluster causing the installation of the controller in Seed clusters.
Generally, the installation performed by Helm charts and consequently, we need to provide these charts in the repository.
Also for the MWE, we prepared the charts directory containing all relevant Helmcharts for the deployment of the controller.
Note that this set of charts is very limited and in production scenarios you might want to add something like a VerticalPodAutoscaler as done e.g. in the gardener-extension-shoot-networking-filter.
However, implementing production ready charts goes beyond the scope of this post, and consequently the MWE charts were added in another commit.
These charts target at running the controller in Seed clusters.
Thus, in charts/gardener-extension-mwe/values.yaml, the image for the deployment is defined.
However, we do not want to push that image to a public container registry for each and every change we make to our code.
Moreover, we want to run the controller on our local machine for development purposes.
Therefore, we need to tweak the values before generating the controller-registration.yaml.
Let's go through it step by step:
git clone https://github.com/23technologies/gardener-extension-mwe.git
cd gardener-extension-mwe
mkdir dev
cp PATH-TO/KUBECONFIG-FOR-SEED.yaml dev/kubeconfig.yaml
Next, we generate the controller-registration.yaml, such that the controller is not deployed to the seed cluster and we can hook-in the controller running locally.
In particular, we set replicaCount=0 and ignoreResources=true in ./charts/gardener-extension-mwe/values.yaml, before generating the controller-registration.yaml:
yq eval -i '.replicaCount=0 | .ignoreResources=true' charts/gardener-extension-mwe/values.yaml
./vendor/github.com/gardener/gardener/hack/generate-controller-registration.sh mwe charts/gardener-extension-mwe v0.0.1 example/controller-registration.yaml Extension:mwe
Now, let's deploy the generated controller-registration.yaml into the Garden cluster:
export KUBECONFIG=PATH-TO/GARDEN-CLUSTER-KUBECONFIG.yaml
kubectl apply -f example/controller-registration.yaml
From now on, Extension resources of the type mwe will be deployed to Seed clusters when new Shoot clusters with
---
apiVersion: core.gardener.cloud/v1beta1
kind: Shoot
metadata:
name: bar
namespace: garden-foo
spec:
extensions:
- type: mwe
...
are created.
In our controller, the Reconcile method will be triggered, when these Extension resources are reconciled.
Therefore, we can run the extension controller with Delve now
dlv debug ./cmd/gardener-extension-mwe -- --kubeconfig=dev/kubeconfig.yaml --ignore-operation-annotation=true --leader-election=false --gardener-version="v1.44.4"
and we can perform debugging operations as explained above.
Remember, Delve will not break the execution until the Reconcile method is called.
Now, Gardener will create Extension resources for Shoots which will trigger the Reconcile method of our controller.
Consequently, we need a new terminal pane in the repository root and execute
export KUBECONFIG=PATH-TO/GARDEN-CLUSTER-KUBECONFIG.yaml
kubectl apply -f example/50-shoot.yaml
Note that it will take some time until the corresponding Extension resource will be created in the Seed cluster.
Hang on tight and wait for the Reconcile method being executed.
You can start investigating where your code goes using Delve now.
Happy hacking!
Last words
This blog post shares our experience, when getting started with Gardener extension development.
We hope that this contribution helps you get started more quickly than us.
If you have any comment or ideas for improvements, do not hesitate to contact us.
We are always willing to improve our work.
