Helm installation #

The operator installation is managed by a helm chart. To install run:

helm install flink-kubernetes-operator helm/flink-kubernetes-operator

Alternatively to install the operator (and also the helm chart) to a specific namespace:

helm install flink-kubernetes-operator helm/flink-kubernetes-operator --namespace flink --create-namespace

Note that in this case you will need to update the namespace in the examples accordingly or the default namespace to the watched namespaces.

Overriding configuration parameters during Helm install #

Helm provides different ways to override the default installation parameters (contained in values.yaml) for the Helm chart.

To override single parameters you can use --set, for example:

helm install --set image.repository=apache/flink-kubernetes-operator --set image.tag=1.4.0 flink-kubernetes-operator helm/flink-kubernetes-operator

You can also provide your custom values file by using the -f flag:

helm install -f myvalues.yaml flink-kubernetes-operator helm/flink-kubernetes-operator

The configurable parameters of the Helm chart and which default values as detailed in the following table:

For more information check the Helm documentation.

Operator webhooks #

In order to use the webhooks in the operator, you must install the cert-manager on the Kubernetes cluster:

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/jetstack/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.8.2/cert-manager.yaml

The webhooks can be disabled during helm install by passing the --set webhook.create=false parameter or editing the values.yaml directly.

Watching only specific namespaces #

The operator supports watching a specific list of namespaces for FlinkDeployment resources. You can enable it by setting the --set watchNamespaces={flink-test} parameter. When this is enabled role-based access control is only created specifically for these namespaces for the operator and the jobmanagers, otherwise it defaults to cluster scope.

Note When working with webhook in a specified namespace, users should pay attention to the definition of namespaceSelector.matchExpressions in webhook.yaml. Currently, the default implementation of webhook relies on the kubernetes.io/metadata.name label to filter the validation requests so that only validation requests from the specified namespace will be processed. The kubernetes.io/metadata.name label is automatically attached since k8s 1.21.1.

As a result, for users who run the flink kubernetes operator with older k8s version, they may label the specified namespace by themselves before installing the operator with helm:

kubectl label namespace <target namespace name> kubernetes.io/metadata.name=<target namespace name>

Besides, users can define their own namespaceSelector to filter the requests due to customized requirements.

For example, if users label their namespace with key-value pair {customized_namespace_key: <target namespace name> } the corresponding namespaceSelector that only accepts requests from this namespace could be:

namespaceSelector:
  matchExpressions:
    - key: customized_namespace_key
    operator: In
    values: [{{- range .Values.watchNamespaces }}{{ . | quote }},{{- end}}]

Check out this document for more details.

Working with Argo CD #

If you are using Argo CD to manage the operator, you will encounter the issue which complains the CRDs too long. Same with this issue. The recommended solution is to split the operator into two Argo apps, such as:

• The first app just for installing the CRDs with Replace=true directly, snippet:

apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
kind: Application
metadata:
  name: flink-kubernetes-operator-crds
spec:
  source:
    repoURL: https://github.com/apache/flink-kubernetes-operator
    targetRevision: main
    path: helm/flink-kubernetes-operator/crds
    syncOptions:
    - Replace=true
...

• The second app that installs the Helm chart with skipCrds=true (new feature in Argo CD 2.3.0), snippet:

apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
kind: Application
metadata:
  name: flink-kubernetes-operator-skip-crds
spec:
  source:
    repoURL: https://github.com/apache/flink-kubernetes-operator
    targetRevision: main
    path: helm/flink-kubernetes-operator
    helm:
      skipCrds: true
...

Advanced customization techniques #

The Helm chart does not aim to provide configuration options for all the possible deployment scenarios of the Operator. There are use cases for injecting common tools and/or sidecars in most enterprise environments that cannot be covered by public Helm charts.

Fortunately, post rendering in Helm gives you the ability to manually manipulate manifests before they are installed on a Kubernetes cluster. This allows users to use tools like kustomize to apply configuration changes without the need to fork public charts.

The GitHub repository for the Operator contains a simple example on how to augment the Operator Deployment with a fluent-bit sidecar container and adjust container resources using kustomize.

The example demonstrates that we can still use a values.yaml file to override the default Helm values for changing the log configuration, for example:

defaultConfiguration:
  ...
  log4j-operator.properties: |+
    rootLogger.appenderRef.file.ref = LogFile
    appender.file.name = LogFile
    appender.file.type = File
    appender.file.append = false
    appender.file.fileName = ${sys:log.file}
    appender.file.layout.type = PatternLayout
    appender.file.layout.pattern = %d{yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss,SSS} %-5p %-60c %x - %m%n    

jvmArgs:
  webhook: "-Dlog.file=/opt/flink/log/webhook.log -Xms256m -Xmx256m"
  operator: "-Dlog.file=/opt/flink/log/operator.log -Xms2048m -Xmx2048m"

But we cannot ingest our fluent-bit sidecar for example unless we patch the deployment using kustomize

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apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: not-important
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: flink-kubernetes-operator
          volumeMounts:
            - name: flink-log
              mountPath: /opt/flink/log
          resources:
            requests:
              memory: "2.5Gi"
              cpu: "1000m"
            limits:
              memory: "2.5Gi"
              cpu: "2000m"
        - name: flink-webhook
          volumeMounts:
            - name: flink-log
              mountPath: /opt/flink/log
          resources:
            requests:
              memory: "0.5Gi"
              cpu: "200m"
            limits:
              memory: "0.5Gi"
              cpu: "500m"
        - name: fluentbit
          image: fluent/fluent-bit:1.8.12
          command: [ 'sh','-c','/fluent-bit/bin/fluent-bit -i tail -p path=/opt/flink/log/*.log -p multiline.parser=java -o stdout' ]
          volumeMounts:
            - name: flink-log
              mountPath: /opt/flink/log
      volumes:
        - name: flink-log
          emptyDir: { }

You can try out the example using the following command:

helm install flink-kubernetes-operator helm/flink-kubernetes-operator -f examples/kustomize/values.yaml --post-renderer examples/kustomize/render

By examining the sidecar output you should see that the logs from both containers are being processed from the shared folder:

[2022/04/06 10:04:36] [ info] [input:tail:tail.0] inotify_fs_add(): inode=3812411 watch_fd=1 name=/opt/flink/log/operator.log
[2022/04/06 10:04:36] [ info] [input:tail:tail.0] inotify_fs_add(): inode=3812412 watch_fd=2 name=/opt/flink/log/webhook.log

Check out the kustomize repo for more advanced examples.

Please note that post-render mechanism will always override the Helm template values.