static-equinix

Demoing static placement on Equinix hosts

This demo shows how to create a liquid metal cluster across 2 Equinix hosts reachable via a VPN on your local machine.

• Demoing static placement on Equinix hosts
  • Demo layout and style
  • Prepping for the demo
    • Deploying the Equinix hosts
    • Tools to install
      • Locally
      • On the Equinix hosts
    • Commands to pre-run
  • Running the demo
    • Top right
    • Bottom right
    • Top left
    • Bottom left

Demo layout and style

I present from a single terminal window using tmux to split the pane into 4.

I use one of the panes for slides, one for running "local" commands, and 2 for looking at things on my Equinix hosts.

There is a video of this in action here. If you don't want to do the demo yourself you can just play this and talk over it.

All the commands you need to run will either be present in the slides, or be run as part of the automated runner thingy.

The slides will have prompts for all the things you will want to talk about.

Prepping for the demo

There are a couple of things you will want to do ahead of time.

In addition to this doc, you may want to read the "getting started" tutorial from the Bootstrapping Cluster API section. You will basically just be following the tutorial along from there but, as said above, everything will be run/provided for you so there is no need to improvise unless you feel comfortable doing so.

Deploying the Equinix hosts

Follow the terraform docs.

Take note of the 2 host ips printed in the output.

Tools to install

These are all required.

Locally

Kubernetes things:

• kind
• docker
• kubectl
• clusterctl

Note: there is a handy gist to install the above on Linux (sudo needed).

Demo things:

• lookatme
• tmux
  • (my tmux config)
• neovim or vim
  • (my nvim config)

On the Equinix hosts

I install tree so that I can run watch tree -d 1 /var/lib/flintlock/vm/default on both and see the state dirs being created as they come up. It looks quite cool.

Commands to pre-run

There are a few commands to run ahead of time.

You should create the management cluster:

kind create cluster

The demo will create and write to ~/.cluster-api/clusterctl.yaml, so either delete that or make a backup somewhere.

Check the value of CAPMVM_VERSION in auto-script.sh and make sure it is using one compatible with the flintlock running on your hosts.

Pre-heating the cache

You'll want to run through everything first to get the mvm images on the hosts ahead of time. This makes it slightly faster for the demo.

To reset after a pre-game:

On your machine:

kubectl delete clusters.cluster.x-k8s.io mvm-test
kind delete cluster --name <cluster name> # or just uninstall the CAPI controllers, this is just me being lazy

On each of the host machines:

rm -rf /var/lib/flintlock/vm/*

Running the demo

Top right

SSH into host0 using the key you set in the terraform vars.

Bottom right

SSH into host1 using the key you set in the terraform vars.

Top left

Start the slides:

cd <PATH-TO-REPO>/getting-started/demos/static-equinix
lookatme --live slides.md

To go to the next slide press space or the right arrow key.

You can scroll down the slides with arrows to reveal more text.

Bottom left

Start the command runner script:

cd <PATH-TO-REPO>/getting-started/demos/static-equinix
./auto-script.sh

Pressing enter will either type out the next command or execute the one typed out.