Pre-installation requirements for GKE

For details about supported platforms for CloudBees CI on modern cloud platforms, such as supported Kubernetes, Helm, and NFS versions, refer to Supported platforms for CloudBees CI on modern cloud platforms.

GKE requirements

The following items are required to install CloudBees CI on modern cloud platforms on GKE:

On your local computer or a bastion host:
- A Kubernetes client with a currently supported version of Kubernetes, installed and configured (kubectl). Beta releases are not supported.
- gcloud (See Installing Google Cloud SDK for instructions).
A GKE cluster running a currently supported version of Kubernetes. Beta releases are not supported.
- With nodes that have at least 2 CPUs, 4 GiBs of memory (so nodes have 1 full CPU / 1 GiB available after running a master with default settings).
- The cluster must have network access to container images (public Docker Hub or a private Docker Registry).
A namespace in the cluster (provided by your admin) with permissions to create Role and RoleBinding objects.
Kubernetes cluster Default Storage Class defined and ready to use.
- Refer to the Kubernetes on Google Kubernetes Engine for more information.

Storage requirements

Dynamic provisioning is required to create persistent volumes. If you don’t enable dynamic provisioning, you will have to manually create a persistent volume.

Because Jenkins is highly dependent upon the filesystem, the underlying storage provider must provide minimal input/output operations per second (IOPS) and latency.

SSD disks are recommended for production usage.

Table 1. Storage recommendations for GKE
	Single AZ	Multiple AZ	High Availability (HA)
Zonal Persistent Disk
Regional Persistent Disk
Filestore

Install High Availability on GKE

To install High Availability in GKE:

Set up a storage class with ReadWriteMany access mode.

CloudBees recommends setting this up in Google Filestore. For more information, refer to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) documentation on the Filestore CSI driver. Be sure to use an SSD-based service tier, as HDD latencies could result in poor performance.

Prepare the Helm values. The following example can be used as a starting point:

OperationsCenter:
  HostName: cloudbees-ci.example.com
  Protocol: https
  Platform: gke
  Ingress:
    Class: nginx
Persistence:
  # default from `gcloud container clusters create … --addons=GcpFilestoreCsiDriver`:
  StorageClass: premium-rwx▼

Managed controllers, as described in HA and caches in CloudBees CI on modern cloud platforms, automatically set cache-related properties to use per-replica temporary folder locations.

It is possible to use generic ephemeral volumes for this purpose, and, in Google Kubernetes Engine, you can define SSD disks for the ephemeral storage following these steps:

Create a node pool with SSD disks:

gcloud container node-pools create with-ssd --cluster=<your-cluster-name> --ephemeral-storage-local-ssd count=1 --machine-type=<your-machine-type> --region=<your-region>(1)▼

1	Replace `<your-cluster-name>`, `<your-machine-type>`, and `<your-region>` with the appropriate values.

Customize your High Availability managed controller to use nodes using the SSD disks:

containers:
      - name: jenkins
        ...
        resources:
          requests:
            ephemeral-storage: "300Gi"
        ...
nodeSelector:
  cloud.google.com/gke-ephemeral-storage-local-ssd: true
...▼

Refer to the Ephemeral storage as an emptyDir volume documentation page for more information.

Ingress requirements

CloudBees CI on modern cloud platforms requires an Ingress controller and has been tested using the Kubernetes NGINX Ingress Community version. Ingress-nginx is the only supported controller.

CloudBees CI creates one Ingress object for the operations center and one for each controller.

If you use an unsupported Ingress controller, you may need to add additional configurations for domains, hostnames, WebSocket, or TCP pass-through. CloudBees documentation can help you with that, but CloudBees does not support this kind of controller. In this case, you must install and configure your Ingress controller and adjust your CloudBees CI chart values according to your situation.

If you plan to provide High Availability (active/active), the load balancer must be configured to enable sticky sessions or session affinity.

Create your GKE Cluster

To create a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster refer to the official Google documentation Create a GKE cluster.

More information on administering a Google Kubernetes cluster is available from the Kubernetes Engine How-to Guides.

More information on Kubernetes concepts is available from the Kubernetes site, including: