Open-RMF Deployment Template

This repo provides a reference template to build, deploy and manage an Open-RMF installation for production use, in cloud as well as on-prem environments

Quick local deployment for testing, in lieu of kubernetes cluster

If you are planning to run a small local deployment and do not want to setup up a kubernetes cluster for it OR run rmf_demos with simulation on your local machine.

docker-compose -f devel/docker-compose-local.yaml up -d

Now access the dashboard with: http://localhost:3000/dashboard and try dispatch a task.

Build

If you are deploying on a public cloud, it is recommeded to use CI / CD pipelines; you may follow the github actions in this repo to setup CI.

(Alternate method) Manual build in liue of CI

To build dockerfiles for deployment manually, emulate the build steps in

.github/workflows/build-images.yaml

Docker images structure

flowchart LR
    ros:$ROS_DISTRO --> builder
    builder --> rmf
    builder --> api-server
    rmf --> rmf-site
    rmf --> rmf-sim
    ubuntu:24.04 --> dashboard
    ubuntu:24.04 --> dashboard-local
    ubuntu:24.04 --> keycloak-setup

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Install kubernetes and setup infrastructure

There are various kubernetes distributions available, we will be using k3s for this template; please feel free to use alternates you may be comfortable with.

# install docker
curl -fsSL get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh && sh get-docker.sh
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker

# install k3s (https://docs.k3s.io/)
# replace ens5 with the interface of your choice 
curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | INSTALL_K3S_EXEC="--flannel-iface=ens5 --disable=traefik --write-kubeconfig-mode=644 --docker" sh -s - 

# install helm (https://helm.sh/docs/intro/install/)
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/main/scripts/get-helm-3 | bash

# clone this repo
git clone [email protected]:open-rmf/rmf_deployment_template.git

# deploy infrastructure components
cd rmf_deployment_template/charts/
./infrastructure/tools/helm_charts_build.bash
export KUBECONFIG=/etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml
helm install -n=infra --create-namespace rmf-infra infrastructure

Additional steps for Local/intranet in lieu of public/internet installation

If you are deploying locally, add your cluster's IP to `/etc/hosts` to point to be able to resolve https://rmf.test

sudo bash -c "echo $(kubectl get svc rmf-infra-ingress-nginx-controller -n infra -o jsonpath="{.spec.clusterIP}") rmf.test >> /etc/hosts"

Setup SSL certifications

If you are deploying on the internet (eg. Cloud VM / managed cluser / etc), letsencrypt provides an easy way of obtaining SSL certificates

# IMPORTANT: Before you proceed to the next steps, make sure your DNS is indeed setup 
# and resolving; this is to avoid hitting letsencrypt's rate limits on DNS failure.
# NOTE: Specify your `ACME_EMAIL` and `DOMAIN_NAME` for letsencrypt-issuer-production
export DOMAIN_NAME=rmf.test
export [email protected]
envsubst < charts/infrastructure/tools/letsencrypt-issuer-production.yaml | kubectl apply -f -

# Verify if certificate was issued successfully.
kubectl get certificates # should be true, if not, might need to wait a couple minutes.

(Alternate method) Local/intranet in lieu of public/internet installation

If you are deploying locally (eg. on your computer / on-prem server / etc) the cluster provides a certification authority that signs different certificates used in different services by the cluster. The root ca certificate can be obtained by:

# create testing ca
kubectl apply -f devel/certs.yaml

# get the ca cert
kubectl -n=infra get secrets rmf-dev-secret --template='{{index .data "ca.crt"}}' | base64 -dw0 > ca.crt

Browser https connections

For self signed certificates, tell your browser to trust the ca.crt cert (instructions depends on the browser).

Deploy

We will use ArgoCD to handle chart changes on this branch of the repository and apply to the cluster. The charts directory consists of helm charts which describes the provisioning of the deployment.

kubectl create namespace rmf
kubectl create namespace argocd
kubectl apply -n argocd -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/argoproj/argo-cd/stable/manifests/install.yaml
kubectl port-forward svc/argocd-server -n argocd 9090:443
# If you get an error forwarding the port, it is likely that socat is unavailable
# on your machine, to fix - sudo apt -y install socat

# Start a new ssh session with port forward 9090 to the VM, you should now be able
# to view the admin panel on port localhost:9090 
# (eg. ssh -L 9090:localhost:9090 my-awesome-server.tld and then open ArgoCD web UI 
# by going to localhost:9090 on your workstation)
# In case you have problems with port forwarding, you may be missing socat on the 
# server, install by sudo apt install -y socat 

# Get the initial password for ArgoCD
kubectl -n argocd get secret argocd-initial-admin-secret -o jsonpath="{.data.password}" | base64 -d

For more on ArgoCD, vist their readthedocs page.

# Connect the repository

## When adding a "new app" on argocd, we will specify the repo, this branch and 
## `charts/rmf-deployment` directory. Similarly to deploy the monitoring tools, use 
## `charts/monitoring` directory.

## Now if you sync the app, we should see the full deployment "come alive"

(Alternate method) Manual deployment in lieu of CD

In case it is not feasible to deploy via CD, a manual deployment is possible via helm

# deploy monitoring stack
helm install -n=monitoring --create-namespace rmf-monitoring charts/monitoring

# install rmf stack
helm install -n=rmf --create-namespace rmf charts/rmf-deployment

# wait for keycloak to be ready
kubectl -n=rmf wait --for=condition=Complete --timeout=5m jobs keycloak-setup

Grafana

The deployment includes a prometheus stack (with grafana). It can be accessed from https://rmf.test/grafana.

To get the admin password, run

kubectl -n=monitoring get secrets rmf-monitoring-grafana -o=jsonpath='{.data.admin-password}' | base64 -d -

Troubleshooting

Unable to list resources on kubectl cli

The kubeconfig file stored at `/etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml` is used to configure access to the Kubernetes cluster. If you have installed upstream Kubernetes command line tools such as kubectl or helm you will need to configure them with the correct kubeconfig path. This can be done by either exporting the `KUBECONFIG` environment variable or by invoking the `--kubeconfig` command line flag. Refer to the examples below for details.

Leverage the KUBECONFIG environment variable:

export KUBECONFIG=/etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml
kubectl get pods --all-namespaces
helm ls --all-namespaces

Or specify the location of the kubeconfig file in the command:

kubectl --kubeconfig /etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml get pods --all-namespaces
helm --kubeconfig /etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml ls --all-namespaces

List of ports and URIs used by the different services

Service	Port	Port handled by	Test Env IP	Production access
RMF http	80	ingress-nginx http	127.0.0.1	http://${URL}/dashboard/
RMF https	443	ingress-nginx https	127.0.0.1	https://${URL}:443/dashboard/
Grafana UI	443	ingress-nginx https	cluster IP	https://${URL}/grafana/
Keycloak UI	443	ingress-nginx https	cluster IP	https://${URL}/auth/

Reserve node for production Deployment

To reserve a node for rmf.

kubectl taint node <node-name> reserved=rmf:NoSchedule

Deleting and Removing the local deployment / installation

To delete the local deployment

helm uninstall -n=rmf rmf

API server crash loop backoff and jwt-pub-key missing

It is generally normal for the first deployment to see this happening, as it has to wait for keycloak to be ready and the `keycloak-setup` job to be completed.

If this issue is persisting and the keycloak-setup job does not show up on kubectl get jobs -A, it means the job was somehow not started. It can be manually spun up again using

helm upgrade rmf rmf-deployment -n rmf

The job should take less than a minute. Verify if keycloak-setup shows up again using

kubectl get jobs -A

and

kubectl get pods -n rmf

Restart the API server pod by running,

kubectl rollout restart deployments/rmf-web-rmf-server