Kubecon2023

My Kubecon2023 talk on "How We Optimized Developer Productivity with Telepresence"

Environment Set up

Commands

# Install the postgresql dependency
kubectl create ns pg
helm install -n pg postgres oci://registry-1.docker.io/bitnamicharts/postgresql --set global.postgresql.auth.password="kubecon2023"

# Create the demo app
kubectl create ns kubecon2023
kubectl apply -f infrastructure/k8s-billing-gateway.yaml -n kubecon2023
kubectl apply -f infrastructure/k8s-converter.yaml -n kubecon2023

# To delete
kubectl delete ns kubecon2023
kubectl delete ns pg

Telepresence Commands

Please follow these instructions to set up Telepresence. Special care should be taken if you intend to use the file mounting feature. See this article for more details.

1. Clear any existing Telepresence sessions with telepresence quit
2. Connect to an existing kubernetes cluster with telepresence connect

Intercepting a service

mkdir -p /tmp/billing-gateway # Set up tmp directory to store env file and mounts

# Connect to the k8s cluster
telepresence connect

# Launch a shell with port forwarding and environment variable injection from billing-gateway
telepresence \
  intercept billing-gateway \
  -n kubecon2023 --port 8080:app \
  --env-file /tmp/billing-gateway/.env \
  --mount /tmp/telepresence-mounts/billing-gateway \
  -- /bin/sh

# Set up local soft links to ensure consistent directory structure
ln -s /tmp/telepresence-mounts/billing-gateway/tmp/billing-gateway/mounts /tmp/billing-gateway/mounts

## Run migration and seed database INSIDE THE TELEPRESENCE SHELL
psql -a -f ./infrastructure/setup-pg.sql

# Launch a shell with port forwarding and environment variable injection from converter
telepresence \
  intercept converter \
  -n kubecon2023 --port 8081:app \
  -- /bin/sh

Once Telepresence is connected to a cluster, you can consider your local machine "inside" the target k8s cluster:

• DNS to .cluster.local endpoints will resolve correctly to the appropriate ClusterIP

Once an intercept is active:

• Telepresnce will forward traffic on the local port (eg. 8080) to the target port on the Deployment (eg. app)
• Environment variables are injected into the target process (eg. /bin/sh)
• Environment variables are stored in a dotenv file (eg. /tmp/.env.billing-gateway-telepresence)
• Pod file mounts are also mounted on the local machine at the specified mount point (eg. /tmp/billing-gateway)