Official Apache Pulsar Helm Chart

This is the officially supported Helm Chart for installing Apache Pulsar on Kubernetes.

Read Deploying Pulsar on Kubernetes for more details.

Features

This Helm Chart includes all the components of Apache Pulsar for a complete experience.

• Pulsar core components:
  • ZooKeeper
  • Bookies
  • Brokers
  • Functions
  • Proxies
• Management & monitoring components:
  • Pulsar Manager
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana

It includes support for:

• Security
  • Automatically provisioned TLS certs, using Jetstack's cert-manager
    • self-signed
    • Let's Encrypt
  • TLS Encryption
    • Proxy
    • Broker
    • Toolset
    • Bookie
    • ZooKeeper
  • Authentication
    • JWT
    • Mutal TLS
    • Kerberos
  • Authorization
• Storage
  • Non-persistence storage
  • Persistence Volume
  • Local Persistent Volumes
  • Tiered Storage
• Functions
  • Kubernetes Runtime
  • Process Runtime
  • Thread Runtime
• Operations
  • Independent Image Versions for all components, enabling controlled upgrades

Requirements

In order to use this chart to deploy Apache Pulsar on Kubernetes, the followings are required.

1. kubectl 1.14 or higher, compatible with your cluster (+/- 1 minor release from your cluster)
2. Helm v3 (3.0.2 or higher)
3. A Kubernetes cluster, version 1.14 or higher.

Environment setup

Before proceeding to deploying Pulsar, you need to prepare your environment.

Tools

helm and kubectl need to be installed on your computer.

Add to local Helm repository

To add this chart to your local Helm repository:

helm repo add apache https://pulsar.apache.org/charts

To use the helm chart:

NOTE: Please specify --set initialize=true when installing a release at the first time. initialize=true will start initialize jobs to initialize the cluster metadata for both bookkeeper and pulsar clusters.

helm install --set initialize=true <release-name> apache/pulsar

Kubernetes cluster preparation

You need a Kubernetes cluster whose version is 1.14 or higher in order to use this chart, due to the usage of certain Kubernetes features.

We provide some instructions to guide you through the preparation: http://pulsar.apache.org/docs/en/helm-prepare/

Deploy Pulsar to Kubernetes

1. Clone the Pulsar Helm charts repository.

   git clone https://github.com/apache/pulsar-helm-chart

   cd pulsar-helm-chart

2. Run prepare_helm_release.sh to create required kubernetes resources for installing this Helm chart.

   • A k8s namespace for installing the Pulsar release (if -c is specified)
   • Create the JWT secret keys and tokens for three superusers: broker-admin, proxy-admin, and admin. By default, it generates asymmetric pubic/private key pair. You can choose to generate symmetric secret key by specifying --symmetric in the following command.
     • proxy-admin role is used for proxies to communicate to brokers.
     • broker-admin role is used for inter-broker communications.
     • admin role is used by the admin tools.

   ./scripts/pulsar/prepare_helm_release.sh -n <k8s-namespace> -k <pulsar-release-name> -c

3. Use the Pulsar Helm charts to install Apache Pulsar.

NOTE: Please specify --set initialize=true when installing a release at the first time. initialize=true will start initialize jobs to initialize the cluster metadata for both bookkeeper and pulsar clusters.

This command installs and starts Apache Pulsar.

```bash 
$ helm install --set initialize=true <pulsar-release-name> apache/pulsar
```

5. Access the Pulsar cluster

   The default values will create a ClusterIP for the proxy you can use to interact with the cluster. To find the IP address of proxy use:

   kubectl get service -n <k8s-namespace>

For more information, please follow our detailed quick start guide.

Customize the deployment

We provide a detailed guideline for you to customize the Helm Chart for a production-ready deployment.

You can also checkout out the example values file for different deployments.

• Deploy ZooKeeper only
• Deploy a Pulsar cluster with an external configuration store
• Deploy a Pulsar cluster with local persistent volume
• Deploy a Pulsar cluster to Minikube
• Deploy a Pulsar cluster with no persistence
• Deploy a Pulsar cluster with TLS encryption
• Deploy a Pulsar cluster with JWT authentication using symmetric key
• Deploy a Pulsar cluster with JWT authentication using asymmetric key

Upgrading

Once your Pulsar Chart is installed, configuration changes and chart updates should be done using helm upgrade.

helm repo add apache https://pulsar.apache.org/charts
helm repo update
helm get values <pulsar-release-name> > pulsar.yaml
helm upgrade -f pulsar.yaml \
    <pulsar-release-name> apache/pulsar

For more detailed information, see our Upgrading guide.

Uninstall

To uninstall the Pulsar Chart, run the following command:

helm delete <pulsar-release-name>

For the purposes of continuity, these charts have some Kubernetes objects that are not removed when performing helm delete. These items we require you to conciously remove them, as they affect re-deployment should you choose to.

• PVCs for stateful data, which you must consciously remove
  • ZooKeeper: This is your metadata.
  • BookKeeper: This is your data.
  • Prometheus: This is your metrics data, which can be safely removed.
• Secrets, if generated by our prepare release script. They contain secret keys, tokens, etc. You can use cleanup release script to remove these secrets and tokens as needed.

Troubleshooting

We've done our best to make these charts as seamless as possible, occasionally troubles do surface outside of our control. We've collected tips and tricks for troubleshooting common issues. Please examine these first before raising an issue, and feel free to add to them by raising a Pull Request!

Release Process

1. Bump the version in charts/pulsar/Chart.yaml.

2. Send a pull request for reviews.

3. After the pull request is approved, merge it. The release workflow will be triggered automatically.

   • It creates a tag named pulsar-<version>.
   • Published the packaged helm chart to Github releases.
   • Update the charts/index.yaml in Pulsar website.

4. Trigger the Pulsar website build to make the release available under https://pulsar.apache.org/charts.