A Tour of the Pulumi Equinix Provider

Equinix recently released their self-maintained, fully-supported Pulumi provider, available in the Pulumi Registry. In this post, you’ll get an overview of the Equinix resources the provider can manage and we’ll show you how to deploy a Kubernetes cluster and associated workloads on Equinix Metal.

Introducing the Equinix Provider

The Equinix provider can manage resources for:

• Equinix Metal, which provides high-performance, bare-metal compute resources.
• Equinix Fabric, which provides software-defined networking that enables low-latency connections between private networks; select service providers like Salesforce, AWS, Azure, and more; and Equinix Metal devices.
• Equinix Network Edge, which enables organizations to deploy virtual network functions (VNFs) (like virtual firewall devices) in a centralized point, greatly simplifying network traffic management for multi- and hybrid cloud scenarios.

Detailed documentation for the Equinix provider can be found in the Pulumi Registry along with 130+ (at the time of writing) other providers that can be used to manage cloud and SaaS resources.

Creating a Kubernetes cluster on Equinix Metal

In order to demonstrate the power and utility of Pulumi and the Equinix provider, Equinix Labs has produced a codebase that creates a Kubernetes cluster on Equinix Metal. The codebase is available in both TypeScript and Python.

The codebase gives an excellent example of one of Pulumi’s most compelling features: the ability to manage and orchestrate many different kinds of resources in real programming languages with a single tool. In addition to the Equinix provider which is used to manage the bare metal compute resources, the codebase also uses the following providers:

1. Cloud-init, to run initialization scripts that install the necessary services to run Kubernetes on the bare metal instances once they are spun up. Much of this work is accomplished via Kubeadm. For an even deeper dive on the services installed on the control plane and worker nodes respectively, see Kubernetes the Hard Way.
2. TLS, to manage cryptographic resources that allow nodes to join the cluster.
3. Command, which is used to synchronize cluster joining operations and to read the kubeconfig from the control plane.
4. Random, which is used to generate a token for nodes to join the control plane.

Before running the Pulumi program, ensure you’ve configured your Equinix credentials. Additionally, if you wish to customize specific aspects of the deployment, you can set the template configuration values. Once that’s done, execute the following commands to deploy the cluster:

cd nodejs
npm i
pulumi up

cd python
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
pulumi up

After executing the commands, the process will require approximately 5 minutes to finish, resulting in a fully operational cluster. From there, you can write the cluster’s Kubeconfig to a file and set it as your default file:

pulumi stack output kubeconfig --show-secrets > kubeconfig.yml
export KUBECONFIG=kubeconfig.yml

Now you can run commands against your cluster with kubectl (or the excellent K9s if you prefer a more GUI-like experience)! For example, to show all running pods:

kubectl get pods --all-namespaces

Deploying a workload with the Pulumi Kubernetes provider

Now that your cluster is provisioned, you can deploy a workload (or any other Kubernetes or Helm resource) using the Pulumi Kubernetes provider. In order to deploy Kubernetes resources to your cluster, you need to first declare an explicit provider. The explicit provider is needed because you are creating the cluster and deploying workloads to that cluster in the same Pulumi program. (For more details on default and explicit providers, see Resource providers.) Configure the provider to use the Kubeconfig of your newly created cluster:

const k8sProvider = new k8s.Provider("k8s-provider", {
    kubeconfig: kubeconfig,
});

k8s_provider = k8s.Provider(
    "k8s-provider",
    kubeconfig=kubeconfig
)

You can then add resources to the cluster by specifying your explicit provider as a resource option:

const nginxDeployment = new k8s.apps.v1.Deployment("nginx-deployment", {
    metadata: {
        // ...
    },
    spec: {
        // ...
    },
}, { provider: k8sProvider });

deployment = k8s.apps.v1.Deployment(
    "nginx-deployment",
    metadata={
        # ...
    },
    spec={
        # ...
    },
    opts=pulumi.ResourceOptions(
        provider=k8s_provider
    )
)

Adding storage

Our cluster as configured will not be able to run stateful workloads due to the lack of a StorageClass from which PersistentVolumes can be provisioned. Popular storage options for bare-metal/edge Kubernetes clusters include Portworx, Longhorn, Rook, or (for non-production scenarios as data loss is likely if a node goes down) NFS.

Conclusion

The Pulumi Equinix provider offers developers an intuitive and efficient way to interact with Equinix resources. By combining the power of Pulumi’s infrastructure-as-code tooling and ecosystem along with the utility of Equinix’s service offerings, you can create and manage networking and bare metal compute resources using a single tool, freeing practitioners from manual configuration so they can focus on value-driving innovation.