Deploy IBM Turbonomic on an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) cluster on AWS

The Turbonomic platform can be deployed on a virtual machine (as a VMware OVA image or Microsoft Hyper-V image) or onto any x86 Linux-based Kubernetes cluster or Red Hat OpenShift platform.

While the Turbonomic platform can be deployed anywhere, such as on public clouds or on-prem, it can manage the resources for workloads that are deployed across hybrid environments. So, you can deploy the Turbonomic platform on an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) cluster to manage the resources for your AWS workloads, any workloads that are deployed across other cloud providers, and also any workloads deployed on-prem.

In this tutorial, we will explain how you can deploy Turbonomic on an Amazon EKS cluster on AWS, secure it using a certificate issued by the AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), terminate transport layer security (TLS) at the network load balancer (NLB), and access the Turbonomic console through a custom domain that you registered in Amazon Route 53.

Prerequisites

• An AWS account
• An Amazon EKS cluster with at least three worker nodes
• Each worker node with a minimum configuration of 4 vCPU and 16 GB RAM
• Block or file storage class configured on the EKS cluster

Turbonomic on AWS EKS Deployment Architecture

The following architecture diagram depicts our deployment architecture for Turbonomic on the Amazon EKS cluster.

Steps

Step 1: Configure the default block storage class

When an EKS cluster is deployed, a default Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) storage class is pre-configured with the name ‘gp2’. Turbonomic supports both block and file types of storage for its data persistence requirements. We will use this pre-configured storage class.

To configure the default block storage, you need to configure an IAM policy with the appropriate permissions to allow worker nodes to create and modify Amazon EBS volumes. After that, you need to deploy the EBS Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver by following the steps in the Amazon EKS User Guide.

In the AWS EKS dashboard, on the Resources tab, you can see the installed EBS CSI driver:

Step 2: Reserve the domain name for the Turbonomic platform

If you do not have a custom domain already, reserve a domain through the Amazon Route53 service (or any other domain registrar) by using the instructions in the Amazon Route 53 Developer Guide. For example, for my URL for the Turbonomic platform (‘turbo.ibmgsilab.com’) I registered for the domain ‘ibmgsilab.com.’

Step 3: Request the TLS certificate

Now, you need to request a public Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate that will be enforced at the network load balancer (NLB) by using the instructions in the AWS Certificate Manager User Guide. You can request a certificate for a fully qualified domain name or with a wildcard. In this example, we requested a wildcard certificate for our domain ‘ibmgsilab.com’.

Step 4: Deploy Turbonomic

You can use the Turbonomic Platform Operator to easily deploy Turbonomic.

Follow the steps outlined in the Turbonomic docs.

Step 5: Configure the NLB

Since the TLS termination is happening at the NLB, we need to change the default backend to a non-TLS port on the nginx.

1. Select the listener ‘TLS:443.’

2. Click the Actions drop-down button, and then select Edit Listener.

   

3. Change the default forward rule to a non-TLS port, and then save the changes.

   

We recommend that you delete the non-secure listener ‘TCP:80’ of NLB unless you really need to access the Turbonomic portal over non-secure port.

Step 6: Create a routing entry in the hosted zone

Go to the hosted zone for your domain and create an A-record.

Create an A-record, and then route traffic to the NLB with an appropriate routing policy.

After you complete this step, you will see an A-record created in your hosted zone.

Step 7: Access the Turbonomic Console from your browser

Now you can access your Turbonomic platform through the web console. You can verify the enforced TLS certificate.

When you access the Turbonomic console for the first time, it will prompt you to set up the password for the administrator user. Set the appropriate password and keep it safe with you. You can later add more users or integrate with your organizations ActiveDirecotry or LDAP for user authentication and role-based access control (RBAC). After you create the password for the administrator user, it will take you to the screen to apply the license.

If you encounter an “https redirection” error while accessing the Turbonomic console, add the environment variable DISABLE_HTTPS_REDIRECT: true into the spec: containers: env section in your nginx deployment using the following command: kubectl edit deployment nginx -n turbonomic.

Summary and next steps

In this tutorial you learned how to deploy IBM Turbonomic on an AWS EKS cluster and configure the AWS networking components to access the Turbonomic platform securely.

Now, you can configure the target environments in Turbonomic and reap the benefits from the automation of continuous application performance.

Learn how you can best use Turbonomic on AWS in the following tutorial: “Dynamically manage AWS Cloud resources with Turbonomic.”