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Managing external workloads

Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd provides opt-in automatic management capabilities for ExternalWorkload resources. This allows you to effortlessly enable VM workloads to join the mesh and benefit from all the security and reliability benefits of Linkerd.

Prerequisites

Kubernetes cluster with Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd installed
BEL needs to be installed with the manageExternalWorkloads value set
Direct network connectivity between the VM and the cluster
DNS on the VM needs to be configured to resolve in-cluster DNS names
SPIRE agent needs to be present on the VM and serve certificates that are rooted in the same trust bundle as Linkerd

Step 1: Install the proxy harness on the VM

In order for the virtual machine to join the mesh, a daemon, called the linkerd-proxy-harness needs to be installed. In order to install it you first need to download the corresponding package for your architecture and distribution from the Releases page. Then run the following command:

apt-get -y install ./package-name

For example, to install the AMD64/Debian package, use the following command:

apt-get -y install ./linkerd-proxy-harness-enterprise-2.17.0-amd64.deb

This provisions a systemd service named linkerd-proxy-harness.

Step 2: Provision the workload group

Next, provision the workload group on the cluster by running the follow command:

cat <<EOF > external-group.yaml
apiVersion: workload.buoyant.io/v1alpha1
kind: ExternalGroup
metadata:
  name: legacy-app-vm
  namespace: mixed-env
spec:
  probes:
  - failureThreshold: 1
    httpGet:
      path: /ready
      port: 80
      scheme: HTTP
      host: 127.0.0.1
    initialDelaySeconds: 3
    periodSeconds: 10
    successThreshold: 1
    timeoutSeconds: 1
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: legacy-app
        location: vm
    ports:
    - port: 80
EOF

kubectl apply -f external-group.yaml

Step 3: Configure the harness

In order for the harness to register itself and send readiness data, it needs to know how to connect to the control plane. You can do that with the following command (note that your control plane addresses might be different):

harnessctl set-config \
  --workload-group-name=legacy-app-vm \
  --workload-group-namespace=mixed-env \
  --control-plane-address=linkerd-autoregistration.linkerd.svc.cluster.local.:8081 \
  --control-plane-identity=linkerd-autoregistration.linkerd.serviceaccount.identity.linkerd.cluster.local

Step 4: Deploy test resources

In order to test the harness connectivity, you can deploy a test workload:

cat <<EOF > test-workload.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: test-server
spec:
  type: ClusterIP
  selector:
    app: test-server
  ports:
  - port: 80
    protocol: TCP
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: test-server
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: test-server
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: test-server
      annotations:
        linkerd.io/inject: enabled
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: test-server
          image: buoyantio/bb:v0.0.5
          command: [ "sh", "-c"]
          args:
          - "/out/bb terminus --h1-server-port 80 --response-text hello-from-$POD_NAME --fire-and-forget"
          ports:
            - name: http-port
              containerPort: 80
          env:
            - name: POD_NAME
              valueFrom:
                fieldRef:
                  fieldPath: metadata.name
EOF

kubectl apply -f test-workload.yaml

Step 5: Test harness connectivity

Test that the harness can reach the service on the cluster:

systemctl start linkerd-proxy-harness
while sleep 1; do curl -s http://test-server:80/who-am-i| jq .; done

You should the following:

{
  "requestUID": "in:http-sid:terminus-grpc:-1-h1:80-824112662",
  "payload": "hello-from-test-server-6bb4854789-x4wbw"
}
{
  "requestUID": "in:http-sid:terminus-grpc:-1-h1:80-858574572",
  "payload": "hello-from-test-server-6bb4854789-x4wbw"
}
{
  "requestUID": "in:http-sid:terminus-grpc:-1-h1:80-895218927",
  "payload": "hello-from-test-server-6bb4854789-x4wbw"
}