Deploy TiDB Operator and a TiDB Cluster on KubeSphere

TiDB is a cloud-native, open-source NewSQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability.

This tutorial demonstrates how to deploy TiDB Operator and a TiDB Cluster on KubeSphere.

Prerequisites

• You need to have at least 3 schedulable nodes.
• You need to enable the OpenPitrix system.
• You need to create a workspace, a project, and two user accounts (ws-admin and project-regular) for this tutorial. The account ws-admin must be granted the role of workspace-admin in the workspace, and the account project-regular must be invited to the project with the role of operator. If they are not ready, refer to Create Workspaces, Projects, Users and Roles.

Hands-on Lab

Step 1: Install TiDB Operator CRD

1. Log in to the KubeSphere Web console as admin, and use Kubectl from the Toolbox in the bottom-right corner to execute the following command to install TiDB Operator CRD:

   kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pingcap/tidb-operator/v1.1.6/manifests/crd.yaml
   

2. You can see the expected output as below:

   customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/tidbclusters.pingcap.com created
   customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/backups.pingcap.com created
   customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/restores.pingcap.com created
   customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/backupschedules.pingcap.com created
   customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/tidbmonitors.pingcap.com created
   customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/tidbinitializers.pingcap.com created
   customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/tidbclusterautoscalers.pingcap.com created
   

Step 2: Add an app repository

1. Log out of KubeSphere and log back in as ws-admin. In your workspace, go to App Repositories under App Management, and then click Add.

2. In the displayed dialog box, enter pingcap for the app repository name and https://charts.pingcap.org for the PingCAP Helm repository URL. Click Validate to verify the URL, and you will see a green check mark next to the URL if it is available. Click OK to continue.

3. Your repository displays in the list after it is successfully imported to KubeSphere.

Step 3: Deploy TiDB Operator

1. Log out of KubeSphere and log back in as project-regular. In your project, go to Apps under Application Workloads and click Create.

2. In the displayed dialog box, select From App Template.

3. Select pingcap from the drop-down list, then click tidb-operator.

   Note

   This tutorial only demonstrates how to deploy TiDB Operator and a TiDB cluster. You can also deploy other tools based on your needs.

4. On the Chart Files tab, you can view the configuration on the console directly or download the default values.yaml file by clicking the icon in the upper-right corner. Under Versions, select a version number from the drop-down list and click Install.

5. On the Basic Information page, confirm the app name, app version, and deployment location. Click Next to continue.

6. On the App Settings page, you can either edit the values.yaml file, or click Install directly with the default configurations.

7. Wait for TiDB Operator to be up and running.

8. Go to Workloads, and you can see two Deployments created for TiDB Operator.

Step 4: Deploy a TiDB cluster

The process of deploying a TiDB cluster is similar to deploying TiDB Operator.

1. Go to Apps under Application Workloads, click Create, and then select From App Template.

2. From the PingCAP repository, click tidb-cluster.

3. On the Chart Files tab, you can view the configuration and download the values.yaml file. Click Install to continue.

4. On the Basic Information page, confirm the app name, app version, and deployment location. Click Next to continue.

5. Some TiDB components require storage classes. You can run the following command to view your storage classes.

   $ kubectl get sc
   NAME                       PROVISIONER     RECLAIMPOLICY   VOLUMEBINDINGMODE   ALLOWVOLUMEEXPANSION   AGE
   csi-high-capacity-legacy   csi-qingcloud   Delete          Immediate           true                   71m
   csi-high-perf              csi-qingcloud   Delete          Immediate           true                   71m
   csi-ssd-enterprise         csi-qingcloud   Delete          Immediate           true                   71m
   csi-standard (default)     csi-qingcloud   Delete          Immediate           true                   71m
   csi-super-high-perf        csi-qingcloud   Delete          Immediate           true                   71m
   

6. On the App Settings page, change all the default values of the field storageClassName from local-storage to the name of your storage class. For example, you can change them to csi-standard based on the above output.

   Note

   Only the field storageClassName is changed to provide external persistent storage. If you want to deploy each TiDB component, such as TiKV and Placement Driver, to individual nodes, specify the field nodeAffinity.

7. Click Install, and you can see two apps in the list.

Step 5: View TiDB cluster status

1. Go to Workloads under Application Workloads, and verify that all TiDB cluster Deployments are up and running.

2. Switch to the StatefulSets tab, and you can see TiDB, TiKV and PD are up and running.

   Note

   TiKV and TiDB will be created automatically and it may take a while before they display in the list.

3. Click a single StatefulSet to go to its detail page. You can see the metrics in line charts over a period of time under the Monitoring tab.

4. In Pods under Application Workloads, you can see the TiDB cluster contains two TiDB Pods, three TiKV Pods, and three PD Pods.

5. In Persistent Volume Claims under Storage, you can see TiKV and PD are using persistent volumes.

6. Volume usage is also monitored. Click a volume item to go to its detail page.

7. On the Overview page of the project, you can see a list of resource usage in the current project.

Step 6: Access the TiDB cluster

1. Go to Services under Application Workloads, and you can see detailed information of all Services. As the Service type is set to NodePort by default, you can access it through the Node IP address outside the cluster.

2. TiDB integrates Prometheus and Grafana to monitor performance of the database cluster. For example, you can access Grafana through <NodeIP>:<NodePort> to view metrics.

   

   Note

   You may need to open the port in your security groups and configure related port forwarding rules depending on where your Kubernetes cluster is deployed.

Thanks for the feedback. If you have a specific question about how to use KubeSphere, ask it on Slack. Open an issue in the GitHub repo if you want to report a problem or suggest an improvement.