While most of you already have container workloads deployed in different flavors on-premise, the ability to deploy Cloud PaaS Services into your on-prem container is a relatively new thing. With the announced support for Azure Arc enabled Data Services on Karbon it is possible to deploy Azure managed SQL instances or PostgreSQL Hyperscale Services to your Arc managed Nutanix Karbon Kubernetes Cluster.

In this post i will guide you thru the process to deploy a Karbon Cluster, register it to Azure Arc, create a Data Controller, a custom location and a PostgreSQL Instance on your on-premise infrastructure.

Create a Karbon Cluster

To create your Karbon Cluster you have to enable Karbon on your Prism Central instance. Note that a IPAM enabled Network is required. Prism need to control the Network where the Kubernetes Clusters are deployed.

Register Karbon Cluster to Azure Arc

To link your Kubernetes Cluster to Azure you need a Subsription where you are able to deploy resources in. The Service User needs Contributor und Monitoring Metrics Publisher rights.

The Prerequisites are:

• A new or existing Kubernetes cluster
  The cluster must use Kubernetes version 1.13 or later (including OpenShift 4.2 or later and other Kubernetes derivatives).
• Access to ports 443 and 9418. Make sure the cluster has access to these ports, and the required outbound URLs
• Azure CLI
• CLI extensions. Install the latest connectedk8s and k8sconfiguration CLI extensions.
• Helm 3
• Kubeconfig file with cluster admin permissions (you can download the config from the actions section in the Karbon Portal)

To Connect the Karbon Cluster to Arc you need an elevated Shell with installed Prerequisites and cluster config to connect to your K8s Cluster. You should see the following success page in Azure after Verification.

Next Step is to create a namespace on your Cluster to go through the next steps. Set a custom Namespace with: kubectl create namespace namespace-name –cluster arc-cluster-name

Next Step ist to create a Data Controller and deploy it to your Arc managed Cluster. In this Example i connect to with direct-connectivity mode. There is also a option to connect in indirect connectivity mode.

Fill out the needed Fields Data controller name and create a custom location. Select “azure-arc-kubeadm” as the Kubernetes configuration template and select “onpremise” as the Infrastructure.

To get the correct Data storage class from your Kubernets Cluster run “kubectl get storageclass” in an elevated promt. In my case i have “default-storageclass”.

At Service Type choose Node Port.

At the end we need a Service Principal to Upload usage Data and logs.

To create it use:

az ad sp create-for-rbac –name SP-Name –role Contributor –scopes /subscriptions/subscription-id/resourceGroups/ressourcegroup-name

and

az role assignment create –assignee SP-ID –role ‘Monitoring Metrics Publisher’ –scope /subscriptions/subscription-id/resourceGroups/ressourcegroup-name

to get the Client Secret from your Service Prinzipal use:

az ad sp credential reset –name SP-Name

The Deployment take a while till the Controller is up and in ready state, so catch a cup of coffee 😀

When youre Data Controller is Ready. You can create SQL Managed Instances or PostgresSQL Hyperscale server group. In this example i create a Postgres Instance.

This will take a few minutes. You can watch the progress with the Kibana Instance which was automatically deployed from Karbon to you Cluster. Navigate to the Cluster and under Add-On you can Launch Kibana. With LogTrail you can view and filter real time events and see what´s going on on your Cluster and deployment of your instance.

As you can see, we got an External Enpoint to Connect to the instance and see the Health of the Service. The Server Group Nodes where the Server Group runs on and the Node configuration.

Next we hop to our Azure Data Studio and connect to the Data Controller to manage the Instance.

To add a Data Controller just klick Connect Controller and fill out the needed Fields Namespace, Kube Config File Path and give it a name. After Discovery you can right click the instance and manage it.

You can view your connections Strings, Worker Node Parameters or Edit Compute + Storage Settings of your Server Group, or jump to Kibana or Grafana to get insights from your Instance. Some Metrics are also available in the Azure Portal on the Metrics.

Now you can play around like Scale up Worker Nodes, push Data to the Database or what else you like to see.

I hope this short walk thru helps a little bit to get this up an running for testing.