Sandbox Deployment#

Tags: Deployment, Infrastructure, Design, Intermediate

Warning

The sandbox deployment is not suitable for production environments. For an in-depth overview of how to productionize your Flyte deployment, checkout the Deployment guide.

What is Flyte Sandbox?#

The Flyte Sandbox is a fully standalone minimal environment for running Flyte. Basically, flytectl sandbox provides a simplified way of running flyte-sandbox as a single Docker container running locally.

The follow section explains how you can use each of these modes and provides more information. We recommend running the sandbox using flytectl locally on your workstation or on a single cloud instance to try out Flyte or for testing new ideas. Flyte Sandbox is not a complete representation of Flyte, many features are intentionally removed from this environment to ensure that the startup times and runtime footprints are low.

Flyte Sandbox as a Single Docker Container#

flytectl sandbox starts a local sandbox environment for Flyte. This is mini-replica of an entire Flyte deployment, without the scalability and with minimal extensions. The idea for this environment originated from the desire of the core team to make it extremely simple for users of Flyte to try out the platform and get a feel for the user experience, without having to understand Kubernetes or dabble with configuration etc. The Flyte single container sandbox is also used by the team to run continuous integration tests and used by the flytesnacks - UserGuide playground environment. The sandbox can be run in most any environment that supports Docker containers and an Ubuntu docker base image.

Architecture and Reasons Why We Built It#

Within the single container environment, a mini Kubernetes cluster is installed using the excellent k3s platform. K3s uses an in-container Docker daemon (run using docker-in-docker configuration) to orchestrate user containers.

When users call flytectl sandbox start --source <dir>, the source <dir> is mounted within the sandbox container and hence it is possible to build images for that source code, using the inner Docker daemon. In a typical Flyte installation, one needs to build Docker containers for tasks and push them to a repository from which K8s can pull.

This is not possible with the sandbox’s Docker environment however, because it does not ship with a Docker registry. Users are free to use an external registry of course, as long as the inner k3s cluster has permissions to pull from it. To reduce the friction of procuring such a registry, configuring permissions to access it, and having to explicitly push to it, we recommend using the flytectl sandbox exec -- ... mode to trigger a Docker build for your code (which is mounted in the sandbox environment) using the docker-in-docker daemon. Since K3s uses the same Docker daemon, it is possible to re-use the images built internally. This greatly simplifies the user’s interaction and ability to try out Flyte, at the cost of hiding one part of the real-world iteration cycle, calling docker push on your task images.

The illustration below shows the architecture of flyte-sandbox in a single container. It is identical to a Flyte sandbox cluster, except that we have built one docker container, with Kubernetes and Flyte already installed.

Architecture of single container Flyte Sandbox

Use the Flyte Sandbox to:#

  • Try out Flyte locally using a single Docker command or using flytectl sandbox

  • Run regular integration tests for Flyte

  • Provide snapshot environments for various Flyte versions, to identify regressions

Deploying your own Flyte Sandbox Environment to a K8s Cluster#

This installs all the dependencies as Kubernetes deployments. We call this a Sandbox deployment. Flyte sandbox deployment can be deployed using the default Helm chart.

Note

  1. A Sandbox deployment takes over the entire cluster

  2. It needs special cluster roles that will need access to create namespaces, pods, etc.

  3. The sandbox deployment is not suitable for production environments. For an in-depth overview of how to productionize your Flyte deployment, checkout the rest of the Deployment guides.

Architecture of Sandbox deployment of Flyte. Single K8s cluster

Deploy Flyte Sandbox on Your Local Machine#

You can deploy the sandbox environment on your laptop workstation to run locally.

Ensure kubectl is installed. Follow kubectl installation docs. On Mac:

brew install kubectl

Recommended using flytectl sandbox start as described in Getting Started

docker run --rm --privileged -p 30081:30081 -p 30084:30084 -p 30088:30088 cr.flyte.org/flyteorg/flyte-sandbox

Deploy Flyte Sandbox to a Cloud Kubernetes Cluster#

Cluster Requirements#

Ensure you have kubernetes up and running on your choice of cloud provider:

If you can access your cluster with kubectl cluster-info, you’re ready to deploy Flyte.

Note

Don’t rely on the name of a Flyte node to always match the name of its corresponding Kubernetes pod or downstream resource. Flyte uses the format executionid-node-id-attempt from the node to assign a name to a Kubernetes pod or downstream resource. But if this is an invalid name for a Kubernetes pod, Flyte assigns a valid name of random characters instead.

Deployment#

We’ll proceed like with locally hosted flyte with deploying the sandbox Flyte configuration on your remote cluster.

  1. Add Helm repo for flyte

    helm repo add flyteorg https://helm.flyte.org

  2. Install Flyte dependency helm chart (this will install the minio, Postgres, Kubernetes-dashboard, and contour)

    helm install -n flyte flyte-deps flyteorg/flyte-deps --create-namespace -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/flyteorg/flyte/master/charts/flyte-deps/values-sandbox.yaml

  3. Install flyte-core chart

    helm install flyte flyteorg/flyte-core -n flyte -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/flyteorg/flyte/master/charts/flyte-core/values-sandbox.yaml --wait

  4. Make sure all pods are in Running condition, If you see anything that’s crashing, check them in this order: postgres, minio, flyteadmin, datacatalog, flytepropeller, Verify Flyte deployment using the following command

    kubectl get pods -n flyte

  5. Get the URL of the ingress service

    kubectl get ingress -n flyte

  6. In order to interact with your Flyte instance using flytectl, initialise your configuration to point to this host

    flytectl config init --host='<CONTOUR_URL>:<PORT>' --insecure

  7. Get Minio & Kubernetes dashboard LB URL by running

    kubectl get service -n flyte

  8. Open the minio console http://<MINIO_URL>. Your minio username is minio and password is miniostorage.

  9. Open the Kubernetes dashboard http://<K8S_DASHBOARD_URL>.

  10. Port-forward to connect minio to flyteadmin using the following command:

    kubectl port-forward --address 0.0.0.0 svc/minio 30084:9000 -n flyte

  11. Port-forward to connect Postgres using the following command:

    kubectl port-forward --address 0.0.0.0 svc/postgres 5432:5432 -n flyte

  12. Use the following credentials for Postgres :

    dbname: flyteadmin
host: 127.0.0.1
port: 5432
username: postgres