The Kubernetes cluster can be configured using Salt.
The Salt scripts are shared across multiple hosting providers, so it's important to understand some background information prior to making a modification to ensure your changes do not break hosting Kubernetes across multiple environments. Depending on where you host your Kubernetes cluster, you may be using different operating systems and different networking configurations. As a result, it's important to understand some background information before making Salt changes in order to minimize introducing failures for other hosting providers.
Each salt-minion service is configured to interact with the **salt-master** service hosted on the kubernetes-master via the **master.conf** file [(except on GCE)](#standalone-salt-configuration-on-gce).
The salt-master is contacted by each salt-minion and depending upon the machine information presented, the salt-master will provision the machine as either a kubernetes-master or kubernetes-minion with all the required capabilities needed to run Kubernetes.
If you are running the Vagrant based environment, the **salt-api** service is running on the kubernetes-master. It is configured to enable the vagrant user to introspect the salt cluster in order to find out about machines in the Vagrant environment via a REST API.
On GCE, the master and nodes are all configured as [standalone minions](http://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/tutorials/standalone_minion.html). The configuration for each VM is derived from the VM's [instance metadata](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/metadata) and then stored in Salt grains (`/etc/salt/minion.d/grains.conf`) and pillars (`/srv/salt-overlay/pillar/cluster-params.sls`) that local Salt uses to enforce state.
All remaining sections that refer to master/minion setups should be ignored for GCE. One fallout of the GCE setup is that the Salt mine doesn't exist - there is no sharing of configuration amongst nodes.
Security is not enabled on the salt-master, and the salt-master is configured to auto-accept incoming requests from minions. It is not recommended to use this security configuration in production environments without deeper study. (In some environments this isn't as bad as it might sound if the salt master port isn't externally accessible and you trust everyone on your network.)
`etcd_servers` | (Optional) Comma-delimited list of IP addresses the kube-apiserver and kubelet use to reach etcd. Uses the IP of the first machine in the kubernetes_master role, or 127.0.0.1 on GCE.
`roles` | (Required) 1. `kubernetes-master` means this machine is the master in the kubernetes cluster. 2. `kubernetes-pool` means this machine is a kubernetes-minion. Depending on the role, the Salt scripts will provision different resources on the machine.
These keys may be leveraged by the Salt sls files to branch behavior.
In addition, a cluster may be running a Debian based operating system or Red Hat based operating system (Centos, Fedora, RHEL, etc.). As a result, its important to sometimes distinguish behavior based on operating system using if branches like the following.
```
{% if grains['os_family'] == 'RedHat' %}
// something specific to a RedHat environment (Centos, Fedora, RHEL) where you may use yum, systemd, etc.
{% else %}
// something specific to Debian environment (apt-get, initd)
{% endif %}
```
## Best Practices
1. When configuring default arguments for processes, its best to avoid the use of EnvironmentFiles (Systemd in Red Hat environments) or init.d files (Debian distributions) to hold default values that should be common across operating system environments. This helps keep our Salt template files easy to understand for editors that may not be familiar with the particulars of each distribution.
## Future enhancements (Networking)
Per pod IP configuration is provider specific, so when making networking changes, its important to sand-box these as all providers may not use the same mechanisms (iptables, openvswitch, etc.)
We should define a grains.conf key that captures more specifically what network configuration environment is being used to avoid future confusion across providers.
