Using SLATE to Deploy Open OnDemand

Open OnDemand is a web application enabling easy access to high-performance computing resources. Open OnDemand, through a plugin system, provides many different ways to interact with these resources. Most simply, OnDemand can launch a shell to remote resources in one’s web browser. Additionally, OnDemand can provide several ways of submitting batch jobs and launching interactive computing sessions. It is also able to serve as a portal to computationally expensive software running on remote HPC nodes. For example, users can launch remote Jupyter Notebooks or Matlab instances.

The SLATE platform provides a simple way to rapidly deploy this application in a containerized environment, complete with integration into an existing LDAP user directory.

Prerequisites

It is assumed that you already have access to a SLATE-registered Kubernetes cluster, and that you have installed and configured the SLATE command line interface. If not, instructions can be found at SLATE Quickstart.

Additionally, this application requires that cert-manager and a volume provisioner be present on the cluster you are installing on. Contact your cluster administrator for more information about this. More information about cert-manager can be found here, and more information about persistent volume types can be found here.

Configuration

Initially, a configuration file for the Open OnDemand application must be obtained. The SLATE client will do this with the following command:

slate app get-conf open-ondemand > ood.yaml

This will save a local copy of the OnDemand configuration, formatted as a .yaml file. We will modify this configuration accordingly, and eventually deploy Open OnDemand with this configuration.

With your preferred text editor, open this configuration file and follow the instructions below.

Cert-Manager Setup

If cert-manager is not already present, contact your cluster administrator. To install cert-manager, the administrator must either set up the SLATE cluster using Ansible and Kubespray, or have access to kubectl on the command line.

When using the Ansible playbook the option for cert-manager must be changed from:

cert_manager_enabled: false

to

cert_manager_enabled: true

More information on using Ansible playbooks can be found here. If the administrator has access to kubectl then cert-manager can be installed using a regular manifest or with helm. Instructions can be found at the official cert-manager docs.

If there are security concerns with using kubernetes secrets, then the administrator can also install a secure access agent such as Vault, Consul, Azure Key Vault, etc. Instructions for installing Vault using Kubernetes can be found at the hashicorp-vault docs

When all of the manifest components are installed, create an Issuer or ClusterIssuer .yaml file so that cert-manager can issue certificates on request by the OnDemand Helm chart. Here is a simple example of a ClusterIssuer .yaml configuration:

metadata:
  name: letsencrypt-prod
spec:
  acme:
    # The ACME server URL
    server: https://acme-staging-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
    # Email address used for ACME registration
    email: admin@example.com
    # Name of a secret used to store the ACME account private key
    privateKeySecretRef:
      name: lets-encrypt-key

Make sure that the name of the issuer is letsencrypt-prod.

Note: The difference between a ClusterIssuer and an Issuer is that the latter is namespace specific.

Modifying Default Values

At the top of the configuration file is a value called Instance. Set this to a unique string you wish to identify your application with. Take note of this value, as it will eventually form part of the URL you will access your OnDemand instance with.

Next, configure the persistent volume that will store authentication data. Under volume, set the storageClass value to a storage class that is supported by your cluster.

To determine the storage classes supported by each cluster, consult individual cluster documentation (slate cluster info <cluster_name>). If this does not yield helpful output, contact your cluster administrator.

Leave the size value at its default 50M.

Then, configure the LDAP and Kerberos sections according to your institution’s setup.

Shell Access

To configure shell access to backend resources, simply fill in the name and host sections for each cluster. If no other features are desired then set all enableHostAdapter fields to false; then skip the ‘Advanced’ section of the values.yaml file.

  - cluster:
      name: "Node1"
      host: "node1.example.net"
      enableHostAdapter: false
  - cluster:
      name: "Node2"
      host: "node2.example.net"
      enableHostAdapter: false

Installation

To install the application using slate, run this app install command:

slate app install open-ondemand --group <group_name> --cluster <cluster_name> --conf /path/to/ood.yaml

Testing

After a short while, your SLATE OnDemand application should be live at <slate_instance_tag>.ondemand.<slate_cluster_name>.slateci.net. Note that <slate_instance_tag> is the instance parameter specified in the values.yaml file, not the randomly-assigned SLATE instance ID.

Navigate to this URL with any web browser, and you will be directed to a Keycloak login page. A successful login will then direct you to the Open OnDemand portal home page. Navigating to the shell access menu within the portal should allow you to launch in-browser shells to the previously specified backend compute resources.

Test User Setup

This Open OnDemand chart supports the creation of temporary test users, for validating application functionality without the complexity of connecting to external LDAP and Kerberos servers. To add a test user(s), navigate to the testUsers section of the configuration file. Add the following yaml to this section for each user you would like to add:

- user:
    name: <username_here>
    tempPassword: <temporary_password_here>

Configurable Parameters:

The following table lists the configurable parameters of the Open OnDemand application and their default values.