Kubernetes First Time Project - Auto-Restarting

Today I gave kubernetes a shot for the first time. I was interested in it's auto-restart feature, so I wrote a simple node.js program

// application that randomly dies, and see how good kubernetes is at restarting it.
console.time('alive');
setTimeout(() => {
  console.timeEnd('alive');
  process.exit(0);
}, Math.random() * 60000);
setInterval(() => {
 console.log('feels good to be alive') 
}, 100)

I downloaded minikube, and virtual box, and ran

minikube start
minikube dashboard

Then I made a super basic Dockerfile

FROM node
ADD randomly-die.js .
CMD ["node", "randomly-die.js"]

Now we've got to build this Docker image, and then create a deployment with kubernetes

eval $(minikube docker-env)
docker build -t randomly-die:1.0 .
kubectl run randomly-die --image randomly-die:1.0 --image-pull-policy=Never

Now we can check the deployments section of the dashboard and see that we have a deployment named randomly-die

From here we can see we have a replica set, and a single pod, which is running our container

Now if we check the pod logs we can see we're up and running

...
feels good to be alive
feels good to be alive
feels good to be alive
feels good to be alive
feels good to be alive
feels good to be alive
feels good to be alive
feels good to be alive
feels good to be alive
feels good to be alive
alive: 4856.096ms

Scaling

Kubernetes makes it pretty easy to scale up how many containers are running. For my final test I wanted to see it run 10 randomly-die containers, and watch it restart them

kubectl scale deployment --replicas=10 randomly-die
# deployment.extensions "randomly-die" scaled

Conclusion

Now we've got 10 containers running that randomly die, and we can watch the "restarts" counter increment as kubernetes restarts them.

Pretty cool!