Configure and deploy the support chart#

The support chart is a helm chart maintained by the 2i2c Engineers that consists of common tools used to support JupyterHub deployments in the cloud. These tools are ingress-nginx, for controlling ingresses and load balancing; cert-manager, for automatically provisioning TLS certificates from Let’s Encrypt; Prometheus, for scraping and storing metrics from the cluster and hub; and Grafana, for visualising the metrics retreived by Prometheus.

This section will walk you through how to deploy the support chart on a cluster.

Create a support.values.yaml file in your chosen cluster folder#

In the infrastructure repo, the full filepath should be: config/clusters/<cluster_name>/support.values.yaml.

Add the following helm chart values to your support.values.yaml file. <grafana-domain> should follow the pattern grafana.<cluster_name>.2i2c.cloud, and <prometheus-domain> should follow the pattern prometheus.<cluster_name>.2i2c.cloud.

prometheusIngressAuthSecret:
  enabled: true

grafana:
  grafana.ini:
    server:
      root_url: https://<grafana-domain>/
    auth.github:
      enabled: true
      allowed_organizations: 2i2c-org
  ingress:
    hosts:
      - <grafana-domain>
    tls:
      - secretName: grafana-tls
        hosts:
          - <grafana-domain>

prometheus:
  server:
    ingress:
      enabled: true
      hosts:
        - <prometheus-domain>
      tls:
        - secretName: prometheus-tls
          hosts:
            - <prometheus-domain>

Warning

If you are deploying the support chart on an AWS cluster, you must enable the cluster-autoscaler sub-chart, otherwise the node groups will not automatically scale. Include the following in your support.values.yaml file:

cluster-autoscaler:
  enabled: true
  autoDiscovery:
    clusterName: <cluster-name>
  awsRegion: <aws-region>

Edit your cluster.yaml file#

Add the following config as a top-level key to your cluster.yaml file. Note this filepath is relative to the location of your cluster.yaml file.

support:
  helm_chart_values_files:
    - support.values.yaml

Deploy the support chart via the deployer#

Use the deployer tool to deploy the support chart to the cluster. See Manually deploy a config change for details on how to setup the tool locally.

deployer deploy-support CLUSTER_NAME

Setting DNS records#

Once the support chart has been successfully deployed, retrieve the external IP address for the ingress-nginx load balancer.

kubectl --namespace support get svc support-ingress-nginx-controller

Add the following DNS records via Namecheap.com:

  1. <cluster-name>.2i2c.cloud, used for the primary hub (if it exists).

  2. *.<cluster-name>.2i2c.cloud, for all other hubs, grafana and prometheus instances.

The DNS records should be A records if using GCP or Azure (where external IP is an IPv4 address), or CNAME records if using AWS (where external IP is a domain name).

Wait a while for the DNS to propagate!