Running Avalanche Validator on Kubernetes

This project deploys Avalanche Validator into k8s cluster. It uses Prometheus operator for monitoring. For details see this Medium article

Prerequisites

# clone project with submodules
git clone --recursive https://github.com/rovechkin1/avalanche-k8s

Clone submodules

# add submodules after regular clone
git submodule update --init --recursive

Install helm

brew install helm

Installing on GCP

Create cluster using cli

./deploy-cli.sh create-cluster cluster-1

Manually creating cluster

Use gcloud web console to create cluster

# Recommended k8s cluster:
# 1-2 Nodes
# Each node 1 CPU/4GB RAM
# Disk size 200GB
# approximate cost: $30/month for 1 node

# get k8s cluster credentials
gcloud container clusters get-credentials <cluster-name> --zone us-central1-c --project <project-name>

Install prometheus and avalanche node with a new staking key

./deploy-cli.sh deploy all

Obtain staking key from running node

./avax-cli.sh staking get ./staking.tgz

Keep it in a safe place in case node needs to be re-created.

Install prometheus and avalanche node with existing staking key

tar xvf staking.tgz
./deploy-cli.sh -k staking deploy all

Delete prometheus and avalanche

./deploy-cli.sh delete all

Update

Update avalanche

Update values in kube-avax/values.yaml

./deploy-cli.sh update avalanche

Update dashboards

This creates or overwrites existing dashboards

./deploy-cli.sh deploy dashboards "node-monitoring/dashboards" <grafana-password>

Monitoring

Grafana

./port-forward.sh grafana

Use browser on locahost:3000 user: admin password: prom-operator

See 'Kubernetes / Compute Resources / Pod -> avalalanche'

Grafana Alarms

Alarms can be be configured to post messages to telegram. To add this functionality after prometheus and grafana are deployed, follow these steps:

1. Create telegram chat and obtain chat id using telegram web interface. Go to your channel and observe its url: https://web.telegram.org/#/im?p=gXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX is the channel id
2. Create telegram bot and obtain its api key from botfather in the form XXXXX:YYYYYYYYYYYY
3. Configure telegram notification in grafana

./deploy-cli.sh create-alerts telegram <channel-id> <telegram-bot-api-key>

4. Redeploy dashboards

./deploy-cli.sh deploy dashboards node-monitoring/dashboards

5. Connect to grafana using port forward and test the alerts using

./port-forward.sh grafana

Miscellaneous

Connect to Avalanche Node Management Port

Via browser

./port-forward.sh avalanche

Via terminal

./avax-cli.sh exec
# 'exit' to exit

Configure prometheus repo

This step is optional unless installing prometheus from repo. For that need to change deploi-cli.sh::deploy_prometheus()

helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo add stable https://charts.helm.sh/stable
helm repo update

Get all peers

curl  -X POST --data '{
    "jsonrpc":"2.0",
    "id"     :1,
    "method" :"info.peers"
}' -H 'content-type:application/json;' 127.0.0.1:9650/ext/info