Airflow Helm Chart

This repository contains a forked version of mumoshu/kube-airflow providing a production ready Helm chart for running Airflow with the Celery executor on a Kubernetes Cluster.

Informations

• Based on work from mumoshu/kube-airflow
• Leverage the Docker Airflow image puckel/docker-airflow

Helm Deployment

Ensure your helm installation is done, you may need to have TILLER_NAMESPACE set as environment variable.

Deploy to Kubernetes using:

make helm-upgrade HELM_RELEASE_NAME=af1 NAMESPACE=yournamespace HELM_VALUES=/path/to/your/own/values.yaml

The deployment uses the Helm's Trick decribed here to force reployment when the configmap template file change.

Helm ingresses

The Chart provides ingress configuration to allow customization the installation by adapting the config.yaml depending on your setup. Please read the comments in the value.yaml file for more detail on how to configure your reverse proxy.

Prefix

This Helm automatically prefixes all names using the release name to avoid collisions.

URL prefix

This chart exposes 2 endpoints:

• Airflow Web UI
• Flower, a debug UI for Celery

Both can be placed either at the root of a domain or at a sub path, for example:

http://mycompany.com/airflow/
http://mycompany.com/airflow/flower

NOTE: Mounting the Airflow UI under a subpath requires an airflow version > 1.9.x. For the moment (March 2018) this is not available on official package, you will have to use an image where airflow has been updated to its current HEAD. You can use the following one: stibbons31/docker-airflow-dev:2.0dev

Please also note than Airflow UI and Flower do not behave the same:

• Airflow Web UI behave transparently, to configure it one just need to specify the ingress.web.path value.
• Flower cannot handle this scheme directly and requires to use an URL rewrite mechanism in front of it. In short, it is able to generate the right URLs in the returned HTML file but cannot respond to these URL. It is commonly found in software that wasn't intended to work under something else than a root URL or localhost port. To use it, see the value.yaml in detail on how to configure your ingress controller to rewrite the URL (or "strip" the prefix path)

Airflow configuration

airflow.cfg configuration can be changed by defining environment variables in the following form: AIRFLOW__<section>__<key>.

See the Airflow documentation for more information

This helm chart allows you to add these additional settings with the value key airflow.config. But beware changing these values won't trigger a redeployment automatically (see the section above "Helm Deployment"). You may need to force the redeployment in this case (--recreate-pods) or use the Configmap Controller.

Worker Statefulset

Celery workers uses StatefulSet instead of deployment. It is used to freeze their DNS using a Kubernetes Headless Service, and allow the webserver to requests the logs from each workers individually. This requires to expose a port (8793) and ensure the pod DNS is accessible to the web server pod, which is why StatefulSet is for.

Embedded DAGs

If you want more control on the way you deploy your DAGs, you can use embedded DAGs, where DAGs are burned inside the Docker container deployed as Scheduler and Workers.

Be aware this requirement more heavy tooling than using git-sync, especially if you use CI/CD:

• your CI/CD should be able to build a new docker image each time your DAGs are updated.
• your CI/CD should be able to control the deployment of this new image in your kubernetes cluster

Example of procedure:

• Fork this project
• Place your DAG inside the dags folder of this project, update /requirements.txt to install new dependencies if needed (see bellow)
• Add build script connected to your CI that will build the new docker image
• Deploy on your Kubernetes cluster

Python dependencies

If you want to add specific python dependencies to use in your DAGs, you need to mount a /requirements.txt file at the root of the image. See the docker-airflow readme for more information.

Makefile

This project uses a makefile to perform all major operation. It is mostly here as a reference to see which commands need to be performed.

Run with minikube (without ingress)

You can start a test on minikube using the following commands:

make minikube-start
make dashboard
make helm-install-traefik
make helm-init
make test
make update-etc-host
make minikube-service-list

You can browse to the airflow webserver using:

make minikube-browse-web

Airflow webserver is not mounted at the root of the URL. You need to append /airflow to the opened window:

http://192.168.99.100:31706/airflow/

Flower is also configured in a subpath of the URL: /airflow/flower. But it behaves badly if a reverse proxy is not properly configured. You can see a full description in the test/minikube-values.yaml file. In this example, the expected behavior is:

• Flower appears at the root for example:

  http://192.168.99.100:32677/
  

• Links point to the subpath, for instance:

  http://192.168.99.100:32677/airflow/flower/tasks
  

  Instead of:

  http://192.168.99.100:32677/tasks
  

Run with minikube (with Ingres)

This example is actually configured to use Traefik as ingress controler that perform the reverse proxy operations, especially for Flower where it is tricky.

For example, if we have this list of available services:

$ make minikube-service-list
minikube service list
|-------------|-------------------------|--------------------------------|
|  NAMESPACE  |          NAME           |              URL               |
|-------------|-------------------------|--------------------------------|
| airflow-dev | airflow-flower          | http://192.168.99.100:32088    |
| airflow-dev | airflow-postgresql      | No node port                   |
| airflow-dev | airflow-redis           | No node port                   |
| airflow-dev | airflow-web             | http://192.168.99.100:30189    |
| airflow-dev | airflow-worker          | No node port                   |
| default     | kubernetes              | No node port                   |
| kube-system | default-http-backend    | http://192.168.99.100:30001    |
| kube-system | kube-dns                | No node port                   |
| kube-system | kubernetes-dashboard    | http://192.168.99.100:30000    |
| kube-system | tiller-deploy           | No node port                   |
| kube-system | traefik-ingress-service | http://192.168.99.100:31333    |
|             |                         | http://192.168.99.100:30616    |
| kube-system | traefik-web-ui          | No node port                   |
|-------------|-------------------------|--------------------------------|

The line that interest us is the port of the first IP exposed by traefik-web-ui. It is the main ingress. If will not be port 80 because of the way minikube works.

The second port is the Traefik dashboard.

Given you have your /etc/host properly set (ex: by make update-etc-host):

$ cat /etc/hosts
192.168.99.100 minikube traeffik-ui.minikube

You can then manually go to the following URL:

• Airflow Web server: http://minikube:31333/airflow/admin/
• Flower: http://minikube:31333/airflow/flower/

And see how both behave nicely !

Scale the number of workers

Udate the value for the celery.num_workers then:

make helm-upgrade

Wanna help?

Fork, improve and PR. ;-)