Installation and Deployment

Aurelius Atlas is distributed as a Helm chart. This allows for easy installation and deployment on any cloud provider or on-premises Kubernetes cluster.

All distributions of Aurelius Atlas are available on GitHub:

Infrastructure Requirements

The following are the minimal infrastructure requirements for deploying Aurelius Atlas:

Prerequisites

Before you begin the installation process, ensure that you have the following prerequisites:

First Time Installation

Once you have your cluster and prerequisites set up, you can install Aurelius Atlas using the Helm chart or Docker Compose. The following sections will guide you through the process.

Configuration Manager

Aurelius Atlas recommends Reflector for managing the configuration of the Kubernetes cluster. To install Reflector, run the following commands:

helm repo add emberstack https://emberstack.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update
helm upgrade --install reflector emberstack/reflector

Certificate Manager and Issuer

To secure your deployment, Aurelius Atlas requires TLS certificates for your domain. Follow the steps below to set up the certificate manager and issuer.

Set Up Certificate Manager

First, you need to install a certificate manager to manage the TLS certificates for your domain.

Aurelius Atlas recommends using cert-manager for managing TLS certificates in Kubernetes.

To install cert-manager, run the following commands:

helm repo add jetstack https://charts.jetstack.io
helm repo update
helm install cert-manager jetstack/cert-manager \
    --namespace cert-manager \
    --create-namespace \
    --version v1.15 \
    --set installCRDs=true \
    --set global.leaderElection.namespace=cert-manager

On successful installation, you should see the following output:

NOTES:
cert-manager v1.15 has been deployed successfully

Set Up Issuer

Next, you need to set up an issuer to issue the TLS certificates for your domain.

Aurelius Atlas recommends using the letsencrypt-prod issuer for production deployments. The helm chart includes a default configuration for the letsencrypt-prod issuer. To set up the issuer with the default configuration, follow these steps:

1. Uncomment the content of the templates/prod_issuer.yaml file in the Helm chart.
2. Update {{ .Values.ingress.email_address }} in the values.yaml file with your email address.

Next, run the following command to install the issuer:

helm template -s templates/prod_issuer.yaml . | kubectl apply -f -

This sets up the letsencrypt-prod issuer with the default configuration in the cert-manager namespace. To verify that the issuer is set up correctly, run the following command:

kubectl get clusterissuer -n cert-manager

You should see the letsencrypt-prod issuer in the list of cluster issuers with a status of Ready.

NAME                                       READY   AGE
letsencrypt-clusterissuer-aurelius-atlas   True    24h

Ingress Controller

Next, you need to set up an ingress controller to route external traffic to your services.

Set Up Ingress Controller

Aurelius Atlas recommends using an NGINX ingress controller. To install the ingress controller, follow the steps below:

helm repo add ingress-nginx https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx
helm repo update
helm install nginx-ingress ingress-nginx/ingress-nginx \
    --set controller.publishService.enabled=true

helm repo add ingress-nginx https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx
helm repo update
helm install nginx-ingress ingress-nginx/ingress-nginx \
    --set controller.publishService.enabled=true \
    --set controller.service.annotations."service\.beta\.kubernetes\.io/azure-load-balancer-health-probe-request-path"=/healthz \
    --set controller.service.annotations."service\.beta\.kubernetes\.io/azure-dns-label-name"=<label>

helm repo add ingress-nginx https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx
helm repo update
helm install nginx-ingress ingress-nginx/ingress-nginx \
    --set controller.publishService.enabled=true

Set Up Certificate

Next, you need to set up a certificate for the ingress controller. To do this, follow the steps below:

1. Uncomment the content of the templates/certificate.yaml file in the Helm chart.
2. Update {{ .Values.ingress.dns_url }} in the values.yaml file with your DNS name.

Next, run the following command to install the certificate:

helm template -s templates/certificate.yaml . | kubectl apply -f -

This sets up the certificate for the ingress controller. To verify that the certificate is set up correctly, run the following command:

kubectl get certificate -n cert-manager

You should see the certificate in the list of certificates with a status of Ready.

NAME                          READY   AGE
aurelius-atlas-ingress-cert   True    24h

Set up DNS

If you are deploying Aurelius Atlas on a cloud provider, but want to use your own domain name, you can set up a DNS record to point to the Load Balancer's IP address. To find the IP address of the Load Balancer, run the following command:

kubectl get service -n ingress-nginx

The output will show the external IP address of the Load Balancer.

Elastic Cloud

Aurelius Atlas uses Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) to manage its internal Elasticsearch cluster. To set up ECK, run the following commands:

kubectl create -f https://download.elastic.co/downloads/eck/2.13.0/crds.yaml
kubectl apply -f https://download.elastic.co/downloads/eck/2.13.0/operator.yaml

Zookeeper

Aurelius Atlas internally relies on Zookeeper. Please ensure that the Zookeeper dependencies are updated by running the following commands:

cd charts/zookeeper/
helm dependency update

Deploying Aurelius Atlas

Once you have set up the prerequisites and configured the necessary components, you are ready to deploy Aurelius Atlas.

Configure Values

Before deploying Aurelius Atlas, you need to configure the values in the values.yaml file. The values.yaml file contains the configuration settings for Aurelius Atlas.

The following are the key configuration settings that you need to update:

Deploy Helm Chart

To deploy Aurelius Atlas using the Helm chart, run the following commands:

helm dependency update
helm install --generate-name -n <namespace> -f values.yaml --wait --timeout 15m0s .

Accessing Aurelius Atlas

Once the deployment is complete, you can access Aurelius Atlas using the DNS name you configured earlier. To access the platform, open a web browser and navigate to https://<dns-name>/<namespace>/atlas/.

Default Credentials

By default, the following users are created:

For production deployments, the passwords for each user are randomized and stored in a Kubernetes secret. The helm chart includes a script to retrieve the passwords for each user. To retrieve the passwords, run the following command:

./get_passwords.sh <namespace>

This script will print the passwords for each user to the console.