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JHipster profile image Jimena Garbarino
Jimena Garbarino for JHipster

Posted on • Originally published at developer.okta.com

Run Microservices on DigitalOcean with Kubernetes

#kubernetes #digitalocean #jhipster #springboot

Cloud adoption continues to increase rapidly worldwide, and not only in the software industry. Every year more and more companies move their applications to the cloud. In the last JHipster community survey, from December 2021, participants valued JHipster's ability to get them to production faster, and requested more tutorials on deployment to cloud platforms. DigitalOcean is among the most popular "other" cloud vendors, according to some surveys. This post is a quick walk-through of the deployment of a JHipster microservices architecture to a Kubernetes cluster in DigitalOcean's cloud.

This tutorial was created with the following frameworks and tools:

About DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean is a cloud services company founded in 2011 by brothers Ben and Moisey Uretsky. Their headquarters are in New York City in the United States, and they also have offices in Massachusetts and Bangalore. Last March 2022, DigitalOcean reached its IPO (Initial Public Offering), and some press articles describe it as the cloud services provider for small businesses: "Cloud services for the Little Guy".

DigitalOcean Logo

DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS) is a managed Kubernetes service that lets you deploy Kubernetes clusters without the complexities of handling the control pane and containerized infrastructure. Clusters are compatible with standard Kubernetes toolchains and integrate natively with DigitalOcean load balancers and block storage volumes. DOKS offers fast provisioning and deployment, and provides a free high-availability control pane, for reliability management. It can also provide a Cluster Autoscaler that automatically adjusts the size of the cluster by adding or removing nodes based on the cluster's capacity to schedule pods. Pricing for Kubernetes workloads is based on resources required by the cluster, droplets, block storage, and load balancers.

The company publishes its data center certification reports on its website, and all the data centers have approved two or more of the following certifications: SOC (System and Organization Controls) 1 Type II, SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3 Type II, and ISO/IEC 27001:2013 (Security techniques - Information security management systems). PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry - Data Security Standard) has been certified in all data centers.

Set up a microservices architecture for Kubernetes

Before working on the application, you need to install JHipster. The classical way of working with JHipster is to do a local installation with NPM.

npm install -g generator-jhipster@7
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If you'd rather use Yarn or Docker, follow the instructions at jhipster.tech.

For this test, start from the reactive-jhipster example in the java-microservices-examples repository on GitHub. The example is a JHipster reactive microservices architecture with Spring Cloud Gateway and Spring WebFlux, Vue as the client framework, and Gradle as the build tool. You can read about how it was built in Reactive Java Microservices with Spring Boot and JHipster.

git clone https://github.com/oktadev/java-microservices-examples.git
cd java-microservices-examples/reactive-jhipster
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If you inspect the project folder, you will find sub-folders for the gateway service, which will act as the front-end application, and a gateway to the store and blog microservices, which also have their subfolders. A docker-compose sub-folder contains the service definitions for running the application containers.

The next step is to generate the Kubernetes deployment descriptors. In the project root folder, create a kubernetes directory and run the k8s JHipster sub-generator:

mkdir kubernetes
cd kubernetes
jhipster k8s
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Choose the following options when prompted:

  • Type of application: Microservice application
  • Root directory: ../
  • Which applications? (select all)
  • Set up monitoring? No
  • Which applications with clustered databases? select store
  • Admin password for JHipster Registry: (generate one)
  • Kubernetes namespace: demo
  • Docker repository name: (your docker hub username)
  • Command to push Docker image: docker push
  • Enable Istio? No
  • Kubernetes service type? LoadBalancer
  • Use dynamic storage provisioning? Yes
  • Use a specific storage class? (leave empty)

NOTE: You can leave the Docker repository name blank for running Kubernetes locally, but a repository will be required for the cloud deployment, so go ahead and create a DockerHub personal account, and the image pull configuration will be ready for both local and cloud deployments.

Build the gateway, store, and blog services container images with Jib. As Jib will push the images to DockerHub, you first need to do a docker login.

docker login
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If you have two-factor authentication enabled, you must generate a token and use it as the password for the login. In the Docker web, go to the user menu and choose Account Settings. Then in the left menu choose Security and New Access Token.

For example, for building the gateway service image:

cd ../gateway
./gradlew bootJar -Pprod jib -Djib.to.image=<docker-repo-name>/gateway
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IMPORTANT NOTE: Unfortunately the application example does not build with Java 17 at the moment of writing this post. As specified in the introduction, this example was built with Java 11.

Check that the images were uploaded to DockerHub, and navigate to the project root folder in the terminal for the next step.

Configure authentication with OpenID Connect

One more configuration step before running the architecture locally, let's configure Okta for authentication.

Before you begin, you’ll need a free Okta developer account. Install the Okta CLI and run okta register to sign up for a new account. If you already have an account, run okta login. Then, run okta apps create jhipster. Select the default app name, or change it as you see fit. Accept the default Redirect URI values provided for you.

What does the Okta CLI do?

The Okta CLI streamlines configuring a JHipster app and does several things for you:

  1. Creates an OIDC app with the correct redirect URIs:
    • login: http://localhost:8080/login/oauth2/code/oidc and http://localhost:8761/login/oauth2/code/oidc
    • logout: http://localhost:8080 and http://localhost:8761
  2. Creates ROLE_ADMIN and ROLE_USER groups that JHipster expects
  3. Adds your current user to the ROLE_ADMIN and ROLE_USER groups
  4. Creates a groups claim in your default authorization server and adds the user’s groups to it

NOTE: The http://localhost:8761* redirect URIs are for the JHipster Registry, which is often used when creating microservices with JHipster. The Okta CLI adds these by default.

You will see output like the following when it’s finished:

Okta application configuration has been written to: /path/to/app/.okta.env
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Run cat .okta.env (or type .okta.env on Windows) to see the issuer and credentials for your app. It will look like this (except the placeholder values will be populated):

export SPRING_SECURITY_OAUTH2_CLIENT_PROVIDER_OIDC_ISSUER_URI="https://{yourOktaDomain}/oauth2/default"
export SPRING_SECURITY_OAUTH2_CLIENT_REGISTRATION_OIDC_CLIENT_ID="{clientId}"
export SPRING_SECURITY_OAUTH2_CLIENT_REGISTRATION_OIDC_CLIENT_SECRET="{clientSecret}"
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NOTE: You can also use the Okta Admin Console to create your app. See Create a JHipster App on Okta for more information.

Add the settings from the generated .okta.env to kubernetes/registry-k8s/application-configmap.yml:

data:
  application.yml: |-
    ...
    spring:
      security:
        oauth2:
          client:
            provider:
              oidc:
                issuer-uri: https://<your-okta-domain>/oauth2/default
            registration:
              oidc:
                client-id: <client-id>
                client-secret: <client-secret>
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Enable the OIDC authentication in the jhipster-registry service by adding the oauth2 profile in the kubernetes/registry-k8s/jhipster-registry.yml file:

- name: SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE
  value: prod,k8s,oauth2
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Run locally with minikube

Install minikube and kubectl.

For minikube, you will need at least 2 CPUs. Start minikube with your number of CPUs:

cd kubernetes
minikube --cpus <ncpu> start
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minikube will log the Kubernetes and Docker versions on start:

Preparing Kubernetes v1.23.3 on Docker 20.10.12 ...
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For the store-mongodb deployment to work, the property Service.spec.publishNotReadyAddresses was required, instead of the annotation service.alpha.kubernetes.io/tolerate-unready-endpoints, as the latter was deprecated in Kubernetes release 1.11.

Edit kubernetes/store-k8s/store-mongodb.yml and add the publishNotReadyAddresses: true property to the spec key near the bottom of the file:

...
# Headless service for DNS record
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: store-mongodb
  namespace: demo
spec:
  type: ClusterIP
  clusterIP: None
  publishNotReadyAddresses: true
  ports:
    - name: peer
      port: 27017
  selector:
    app: store-mongodb
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Then deploy the application to minikube. In the kubernetes directory, run:

./kubectl-apply.sh -f
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Now is a good time to install k9s, a terminal-based UI to interact with Kubernetes clusters. Then run k9s with:

k9s -n demo
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k9s User Interface

Check out the commands list, some useful ones are:

  • :namespace: show all available namespaces
  • :pods: show all available pods

You can navigate the pods with ENTER and go back with ESC keys.

Set up port-forwarding for the JHipster Registry.

kubectl port-forward svc/jhipster-registry -n demo 8761
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Navigate to http://localhost:8761 and sign in with your Okta credentials. When the registry shows all services in green, Set up port-forwarding for the gateway as well.

kubectl port-forward svc/gateway -n demo 8080
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Navigate to http://localhost:8080, sign in, and create some entities to verify everything is working fine.

After looking around, stop minikube before the cloud deployment:

minikube stop
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Also delete the minikube cluster to have a clean slate for future tests:

minikube delete
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Deploy to DigitalOcean Kubernetes

Now that the architecture works locally, let's proceed to the cloud deployment. First, create a DigitalOcean account. The registration requires a $5 PayPal payment, or providing a credit card.

Most of the cluster tasks, if not all, can be accomplished using doctl, the command-line interface (CLI) for the DigitalOcean API. Install the tool, and perform the authentication with DigitalOcean:

doctl auth init
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You will be prompted to enter the DigitalOcean access token that you can generate in the DigitalOcean control panel. Sign in, and then in the left menu go to API, click Generate New Token. Enter a token name, and click Generate Token. Copy the new token from the Tokens/Keys table.

DigitalOcean Control Panel for Token Create

You can find a detailed list of pricing for cluster resources at DigitalOcean, and with doctl you can quickly retrieve a list of node size options available for your account:

doctl k options sizes
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Create the cluster with the following command line:

doctl k cluster create do1 -v --size s-4vcpu-8gb-intel
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After creating a cluster, doctl adds a configuration context to kubectl and makes it active, so you can start monitoring your cluster right away with k9s. First, apply the resources configuration to the DigitalOcean cluster:

./kubectl-apply.sh -f
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Monitor the deployment with k9s:

k9s -n demo
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k9s UI monitoring DigitalOcean Kubernetes

Once you see the jhipster-registry pods are up, set up port forwarding again so you can also monitor the status of the services in the registry UI.

Notes on DigitalOcean's node sizes and volumes

Deploying to a Kubernetes cluster on DigitalOcean's cloud can be tricky if you don't specify enough capacity from the start.

At first, I tested the cluster with the highest size Intel nodes available for my account, s-2vcpu-4gb-intel. I attempted to run the application in the default cluster configuration, a three-node cluster with a single node pool in the nyc1 region, using the latest Kubernetes version. As I started to see pods not running due to insufficient CPU, I increased the number of nodes and got everything working. DigitalOcean's latest and default Kubernetes version at the moment of writing this post was 1.22.8.

If you need to find out the reason why a pod is not running, you can get the pod events with kubectl describe, for example, for the jhipster-registry-0 pod:

kubectl describe pod jhipster-registry-0 -n demo
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The output of the command, in the events section, for a pod that has failed due to insufficient cpu, looks like the following:

Events:
  Type     Reason                  Age                   From                     Message
  ----     ------                  ----                  ----                     -------
  Normal   NotTriggerScaleUp       4m30s                 cluster-autoscaler       pod didn't trigger scale-up:
  Warning  FailedScheduling        69s (x3 over 95s)     default-scheduler        0/3 nodes are available: 3 Insufficient cpu.
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If you see a pod failing in k9s, check the events for that pod with kubectl describe pod as in the example above.

To add CPU, increase the number of nodes with doctl:

doctl k cluster node-pool update do1 do1-default-pool --count 4
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You don't need to restart pods when adding nodes.

After I increased CPU (adding one more node to the cluster), some of the pods, in the store-mongodb stateful set with 3 replicas, did not run due to unbound immediate PersistentVolumeClaims. This was reported in the pod events, in the output of kubectl describe pod, for the failing pods. I then inspected persistent volume claims with the following commands:

kubectl get pvc -n demo
kubectl describe pvc datadir-store-mongodb-2 -n demo
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The kubectl describe pvc command output was showing provisioning errors, and instructed to contact support:

Events:
  Type     Reason                Age                  From                                                                       Message
  ----     ------                ----                 ----                                                                       -------
  Normal   Provisioning          3m6s (x10 over 11m)  dobs.csi.digitalocean.com_master-do3_cebb3451-5eba-4805-956c-753ec148e2ea  External provisioner is provisioning volume for claim "demo/datadir-store-mongodb-2"
  Warning  ProvisioningFailed    3m5s (x10 over 11m)  dobs.csi.digitalocean.com_master-do3_cebb3451-5eba-4805-956c-753ec148e2ea  failed to provision volume with StorageClass "do-block-storage": rpc error: code = ResourceExhausted desc = volume limit (10) has been reached. Current number of volumes: 10. Please contact support.
  Normal   ExternalProvisioning  103s (x43 over 11m)  persistentvolume-controller                                                waiting for a volume to be created, either by external provisioner "dobs.csi.digitalocean.com" or manually created by system administrator
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As instructed by the event message, I contacted DigitalOcean support and they fixed it.

Finally, as I first registered for the free trial account, I had to open a second support ticket requesting higher node sizes, so I could use the size s-4vcpu-8gb-intel. Not all the size options were available after signing up for the trial, but that is not the case for a standard account. Billing should be under $10 USD for a short Kubernetes service test.

Find your gateway's external IP and update redirect URIs

Once all the pods are running, find the gateway external IP with the kubectl describe command:

kubectl describe service gateway -n demo
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The output will look like this:

Name:                     gateway
Namespace:                demo
Labels:                   app=gateway
Annotations:              kubernetes.digitalocean.com/load-balancer-id: e81d2b8c-6c28-430d-8ba8-6dab29a1ba76
                          service.beta.kubernetes.io/do-loadbalancer-certificate-id: bd0b1d03-0f90-449d-abbe-ac6a4026c133
Selector:                 app=gateway
Type:                     LoadBalancer
IP Family Policy:         SingleStack
IP Families:              IPv4
IP:                       10.245.47.51
IPs:                      10.245.47.51
LoadBalancer Ingress:     157.230.200.181
Port:                     http  8080/TCP
TargetPort:               8080/TCP
NodePort:                 http  31048/TCP
Endpoints:                10.244.1.42:8080
Session Affinity:         None
External Traffic Policy:  Cluster
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Update the redirect URIs in Okta to allow the gateway address as a valid redirect. Run okta login, open the returned URL in your browser, and sign in to the Okta Admin Console. Go to the Applications section, find your application, edit, and add:

  • Sign-in redirect URIs: http://<load-balancer-ingress-ip>:8080/login/oauth2/code/oidc
  • Sign-out redirect URIs: http://<load-balancer-ingress-ip>:8080

Navigate to http://<load-balancer-ingress-ip>:8080 and rejoice when everything works!

Secure web traffic with HTTPS

Since the gateway service acts as the application front-end, in the k8s descriptors it is defined as a LoadBalancer service type. This exposes the service externally using the cloud provider's load balancer. DigitalOcean load balancers are a fully-managed, highly available network load-balancing service. Load balancers distribute traffic to groups of droplets, which decouples the overall health of a backend service from the health of a single server to ensure that your services stay online.

The standard practice is to secure web traffic to your application with HTTPS. For traffic encryption, you need a TLS (SSL) certificate. DigitalOcean also provides automatic certificate creation and renewal if you manage your domain with DigitalOcean's DNS, which is free. But domain registration is not provided. To use DigitalOcean's DNS, you need to register a domain name with a registrar and update your domain's NS records to point to DigitalOcean's name servers.

Then, for using DigitalOcean's managed domain and certificate, you must delegate the domain, updating NS records in the registrar. Because of this requirement, you cannot use free DNS services where you cannot set up NS records, like nip.io.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Before changing the registrar NS records (the nameservers), add your domain to DigitalOcean, to minimize service disruptions.

You can create the certificate and the domain at the same time in the DigitalOcean control panel, when you set up the load balancer HTTPS forwarding.

DigitalOcean load balancers support two main configurations for encrypted web traffic:

  • SSL termination: decrypts SSL requests at the load balancer and sends them unencrypted to the backend at the Droplets' private IP address. The slower and CPU-intensive work of decryption is performed at the load balancer, and certificate management is simplified. The traffic between the load balancer and the backend is secured by routing over the VPC network, but data is readable inside the private network.
  • SSL passthrough: sends the encrypted SSL requests directly to the backend at the Droplets' private IP address, traffic between the load balancer and the backend is secured. Every backend server must have the certificate, and client information contained in X-forwarded-* headers might be lost.

Taking advantage of the simplified certificate management, SSL termination will be configured in the following steps through the DigitalOcean control panel.

Log in to your DigitalOcean account, and in the left menu choose Kubernetes. Then choose your cluster, and on the cluster page, choose Resources. In the LOAD BALANCERS list, choose the single load balancer that must have been created. On the load balancer page, choose the Settings tab. Click Edit in the Forwarding Rules. Add a forwarding rule for HTTPS in port 443, and in the certificate drop-down, choose New certificate.

DigitalOcean new certificate form

In the New Certificate form, choose the Use Let's Encrypt tab, and then in the domain box, choose Add new domain. Then enter your domain name, and list other subdomains to include. Add a name for the certificate and click Generate Certificate.

DigitalOcean new domain form

Back in the Forwarding rules page, check that the generated certificate is selected, and forward the traffic to the droplet HTTP port where the gateway is running. Tick the checkbox Create DNS records for all the new Let's Encrypt certificates and then Save the forwarding settings.

DigitalOcean load balancer forwarding settings

Finally, in the SSL section of the settings, tick the checkbox Redirect HTTP to HTTPS.

DigitalOcean load balancer SSL redirect settings

Once again, update the redirect URIs in Okta to allow the newly configured domain. Add the following redirect URIs:

  • Sign-in redirect URIs: https://<your-domain>/login/oauth2/code/oidc
  • Sign-out redirect URIs: https://<your-domain>

Test the configuration by navigating to http://<your-domain>. First, the load balancer should redirect to HTTPs, and then the gateway should redirect to the Okta sign-in page.

Inspect and manage cluster resources

You can retrieve the cluster associated resources with the following doctl command:

doctl k cluster list-associated-resources do1
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The output will list the volumes and load balancers created for the cluster, which generate billing charges besides the cost of the nodes:

Volumes                                                                                                                                                                                       Volume Snapshots    Load Balancers
[a33dbaba-cb22-11ec-9383-0a58ac145375 a6e18809-cb22-11ec-8723-0a58ac14468c 65fb3778-cb23-11ec-9383-0a58ac145375 ac106c49-cb22-11ec-9383-0a58ac145375 c7122288-cb22-11ec-bd08-0a58ac14467d]    []                  [8ebbcbf2-1e67-46f5-b38a-eddae17f00f3]
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Unfortunately, there is no way to pause the cluster. According to DigitalOcean, you can power a droplet off, but this does not halt the billing. Billing costs can be reduced by taking a snapshot of the droplet and then destroying it. The snapshot cost is less expensive.

While testing the platform, you can delete the cluster in between sessions, to avoid spending the trial credit while not actively working on it.

doctl k cluster delete do1
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Volumes provisioned to the cluster are not deleted with the cluster, and charges are generated hourly. You can delete volumes using the control panel or with the following commands:

doctl compute volume list
doctl compute volume delete <volume-id>
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The load balancers are not deleted with the cluster either:

doctl compute load-balancer list
doctl compute load-balancer delete <load-balancer-id>
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During registration, a project must have been created, allowing you to organize resources. You can list all the resources associated with a project with the following command:

doctl projects list
doctl projects resources list <project-id>
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Learn more about JHipster and Kubernetes

This has been a brief walkthrough for deploying JHipster to a DigitalOcean's managed Kubernetes cluster. Some important topics for production deployment were not covered in this post, to focus in particular on DigitalOcean resource requirements. Some key topics we did not cover in this post include external configuration storage with Spring Cloud Config and Git as well as secrets encryption both for the cloud configuration and Kubernetes configuration. You can learn about these good practices in the first post of this cloud deployment series: Kubernetes to the Cloud with Spring Boot and JHipster.

Keep learning, and for more content on JHipster, check out the following links:

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