Deployment using Kubernetes
Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
This page will describe how to setup a Kubernetes controller on your machine and a worker node on your drone to run the MRS UAV System, you could potentially use this setup to deploy a swarm of drones, each with their own worker agents.
Install Kubernetes and Helm
The following command will install K3s, a lightweight distro of Kubernetes. Alternatively, you can use K0s, KubeSolo or Talos.
curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | K3S_KUBECONFIG_MODE="644" INSTALL_K3S_EXEC="server" sh -
For some commands to work properly, you should configure cluster access. Put the following in your ~/.bashrc
alias kubectl='k3s kubectl'
export KUBECONFIG=/etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml
Next, install Helm, the package manager for K8s, letting you template manifest files and put things like environment variables, which is unfortunately not supported out of the box:
curl -sfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/main/scripts/get-helm-3 | bash
Get the mrs_docker repo
Clone the mrs_docker repository, then under deployment/ros2/kubernetes you'll find Chart.yaml which is used to denote a Helm chart, up.sh and down.sh wrappers for Kubernetes commands, shared_data and the templates folder where the cluster configuration is.
Configure environment variables
In the values.yaml file you can configure deployment variables (mrsUavSystemVersion and homeFolder), as well as environment variables that will be set in every pod, this is passed by helm to templates/config.yaml, the file is also sourced in up.sh and down.sh.
For more info about setting the environment variables, check the native installation.
Deploy to Kubernetes
Before you start the session, you should edit templates/deployment.yaml according to your needs, for example to add or remove sensors your drone uses. The main image used will be ctumrs/mrs_uav_system.
On the drone
You can use ./up.sh to start a session in the background and ./down.sh to end it.
Useful info
By default, k3s uses containerd, it can be switched to Docker by adding --docker to the install command as detailed here.
To transfer images between Docker and containerd, you have several options, you can save and import it:
docker save ctumrs/mrs_uav_system:stable > mrs.tar
sudo ctr images import mrs.tar
You can also do that with no temporary file
docker save ctumrs/mrs_uav_system:stable | sudo ctr images import -
Or you can setup a local registry in Docker, set it as a private registry and pull the image into containerd:
sudo ctr images pull localhost:5000/ctumrs/mrs_uav_system:latest
If your ip changes, you may have issues with your nodes. To fix it you can set a static ip and restart k3s:
sudo tee /etc/rancher/k3s/config.yaml <<< 'node-ip: "192.168.0.105"'
sudo systemctl restart k3s
A popular cluster visualiser is k9s.