Deploying Vertica on Vultr Kubernetes Engine (VKE)

About Vertica

Vertica is an industry-leading analytics platform providing fast, flexible, extensible, and SQL-compatible analytics on data lakes and data warehouses. Vertica offers a free-to-try Community Edition (CE) that supports up to 3 nodes serving a total of 1 terabyte of data. Vertica CE is installed in this example and can be upgraded by applying a license key. Learn more about Vertica.

Vertica's architecture separates compute and storage allows cost-effective, scalable, secure and performant operation on cloud and containerized platforms like Kubernetes. Vertica provides comprehensive open-source tooling to enable deployment and management on Kuberenetes, which we will demonstrate in this exercise.

Deploying Vertica on VKE

To demonstrate the flexibility and compatibility of Vertica on Kubernetes and S3 object storage, this document describes how to deploy Vertica Community Edition (CE) on Vultr, a cloud platform that provides S3 object storage and Kubernetes infrastructure that meet standards but are not officially supported.

Prerequisities for Vertica deployment:

• Configure a Vertica client: vsql CLI, ODBC/JDBC drivers, and others are available.
• Set up a Vultr account.
• Create an object store with an S3 bucket under Objects and obtain the access and secret keys as well as bucket endpoint and S3 path.
• Create a Kubernetes cluster (minimum 3 Cloud Compute nodes with 2 CPU / 4 GB RAM each) and download the cluster YAML configuration.
• Install kubectl and helm locally to manage the Kubernetes cluster. Ensure that kubectl uses the VKE cluster YAML configuration file.

The deployment largely follows the Vertica documentation. Please refer to the documentation for all possible options. The following steps will create a minimally configured Vertica cluster.

Install cert-manager:

$ kubectl apply -f https://github.com/jetstack/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.5.3/cert-manager.yaml

Verify cert-manager is running:

$ kubectl get pods --namespace cert-manager
NAME                                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
cert-manager-7dd5854bb4-skks7              1/1     Running   5          12d
cert-manager-cainjector-64c949654c-9nm2z   1/1     Running   5          12d
cert-manager-webhook-6bdffc7c9d-b7r2p      1/1     Running   5          12d

Configure the Vertica helm chart repository:

$ helm repo add vertica-charts https://vertica.github.io/charts

Update the repository to ensure you have the latest version:

$ helm repo update

Install the VerticaDB operator:

$ helm install vdb-op vertica-charts/verticadb-operator

Create a secret storing your S3 keys:

$ kubectl create secret generic s3-creds --from-literal=accesskey=yourAccesskey --from-literal=secretkey=yourSecretkey

Create a secret storing your dbadmin (superuser) password:

$ kubectl create secret generic su-passwd --from-literal=password=yourPassword

Create a YAML file "vertica.yaml" to configure a Vertica database - you must edit path and endpoint to match your environment:

apiVersion: vertica.com/v1beta1
kind: VerticaDB
metadata:
  name: vertica-demo
spec:
  initPolicy: Create
  superuserPasswordSecret: su-passwd
  communal:
    path: s3://bucket/path
    endpoint: https://ewr1.vultrobjects.com
    credentialSecret: s3-creds
  local:
    requestSize: 64Gi
  subclusters:
    - name: defaultsubcluster
      size: 3
      serviceType: LoadBalancer
      nodePort: 32001

Apply the YAML file:

$ kubectl create -f vertica.yaml

Check service status:

$ kubectl get svc

When the service is up and the external IP and port are available, you will be able to connect as dbadmin with your Vertica client:

$ kubectl get svc
NAME                                 TYPE           CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)                         AGE
kubernetes                           ClusterIP      10.96.0.1       <none>        443/TCP                         25m
vertica-demo                         ClusterIP      None            <none>        22/TCP                          18m
vertica-demo-defaultsubcluster       LoadBalancer   10.96.39.25     x.y.z.w       5433:32001/TCP,5444:31390/TCP   18m
verticadb-operator-webhook-service   ClusterIP      10.100.167.55   <none>        443/TCP                         20m

$ vsql -h x.y.z.w -p 5433 -U dbadmin -w secret-password
Welcome to vsql, the Vertica Analytic Database interactive terminal.

Type:  \h or \? for help with vsql commands
       \g or terminate with semicolon to execute query
       \q to quit

dbadmin=> select * from nodes;
     node_name     |      node_id      | node_state | is_primary | is_readonly | node_address  | node_address_family | export_address | export_address_family |                  catalog_path                  | node_type | is_ephemeral | standing_in_for |  subcluster_name  |     last_msg_from_node_at     | node_down_since |                     build_info
-------------------+-------------------+------------+------------+-------------+---------------+---------------------+----------------+-----------------------+------------------------------------------------+-----------+--------------+-----------------+-------------------+-------------------------------+-----------------+----------------------------------------------------
 v_vertdb_node0003 | 45035996273704984 | UP         | t          | f           | 10.244.66.4   | ipv4                | 10.244.66.4    | ipv4                  | /data/vertdb/v_vertdb_node0003_catalog/Catalog | PERMANENT | f            |                 | defaultsubcluster | 2022-02-23 23:57:25.005626+00 |                 | v11.1.0-0-669fd97287b9c05ae8b69656c04c16cffa268024
 v_vertdb_node0001 | 45035996273842972 | UP         | t          | f           | 10.244.35.198 | ipv4                | 10.244.35.198  | ipv4                  | /data/vertdb/v_vertdb_node0001_catalog/Catalog | PERMANENT | f            |                 | defaultsubcluster | 2022-02-24 00:00:55.02184+00  |                 | v11.1.0-0-669fd97287b9c05ae8b69656c04c16cffa268024
 v_vertdb_node0002 | 45035996273842976 | UP         | t          | f           | 10.244.156.68 | ipv4                | 10.244.156.68  | ipv4                  | /data/vertdb/v_vertdb_node0002_catalog/Catalog | PERMANENT | f            |                 | defaultsubcluster | 2022-02-23 22:57:57.528649+00 |                 | v11.1.0-0-669fd97287b9c05ae8b69656c04c16cffa268024
(3 rows)