NOTE cert-manager is a better solution to what follows.

I’ve a need to deploy a Vultr Kubernetes Engine (VKE) cluster on a daily basis (create and delete within a few hours) and expose (securely|TLS) a gRPC service.

I have an existing solution Automatic Certs w/ Golang gRPC service on Compute Engine that combines a gRPC Healthchecking and an ACME service and decided to reuse this.

In order for it work, we need:

I’ve begun exploring Vultr after the company announced a managed Kubernetes offering Vultr Kubernetes Engine (VKE).

In my brief experience, it’s a decent platform and its CLI vultr-cli is mostly (!) good. The CLI has a limitation in that command output is text formatted and this makes it challenging to parse the output when scripting.

NOTE The Vultr developers have a branch rewrite that includes a solution to this problem.

Example

ID              12345678-90ab-cdef-1234-567890abcdef
LABEL           test
DATE CREATED    2022-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
CLUSTER SUBNET  255.255.255.255/16
SERVICE SUBNET  255.255.255.255/12
IP              255.255.255.255
ENDPOINT        12345678-90ab-cdef-1234-567890abcdef.vultr-k8s.com
VERSION         v1.23.5+3
REGION          mars
STATUS          pending
 
NODE POOLS
ID              12345678-90ab-cdef-1234-567890abcdef
DATE CREATED    2022-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
DATE UPDATED    2022-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
LABEL           nodepool
TAG             foo
PLAN            vc2-1c-2gb
STATUS          pending
NODE QUANTITY   1
AUTO SCALER     false
MIN NODES       1
MAX NODES       1
 
NODES
ID                                      DATE CREATED                    LABEL                   STATUS
12345678-

Until that’s available, I’m lazy writing very simple bash scripts to parse vultr-cli command output as JSON. The repo is vultr-cli-format.

I’ve been on a roll building utilities this week. I developed a Service Health dashboard for my “thing”, a Prometheus Exporter for Fly.io and today, a Prometheus Exporter for Vultr. This is motivated by the fear that I will forget a deployed Cloud resource and incur a horrible bill.

I’ve no written several Prometheus Exporters for cloud platforms:

• Prometheus Exporter for GCP
• Prometheus Exporter for Linode
• Prometheus Exporter for Fly.io
• Prometheus Exporter for Vultr

Each of them monitors resource deployments and produces resource count metrics that can be scraped by Prometheus and alerted with Alertmanager. I have Alertmanager configured to send notifications to Pushover. Last week I wrote an integration between Google Cloud Monitoring to send notifications to Pushover too.