nomad-driver-containerd

We are actively looking for contributors and maintainers for this project. If you have experience in container internals e.g. cgroups, namespaces, or have contributed to any open source projects around containers e.g. docker, containerd, nerdctl, podman etc or build tooling which involves dealing with container internals, and are interested in contributing to this project, I would love to talk to you! Golang experience is preferred but not required.

Please reach out to me @_shishir_m or open an issue in this repository with your contact details, if you are interested in contributing to this project.

Overview

Nomad task driver for launching containers using containerd.

Containerd (containerd.io) is a lightweight container daemon for running and managing container lifecycle.
Docker daemon also uses containerd.

dockerd (docker daemon) --> containerd --> containerd-shim --> runc

nomad-driver-containerd enables nomad client to launch containers directly using containerd, without docker!
Docker daemon is not required on the host system.

nomad-driver-containerd architecture

Requirements

• Nomad >=v1.0
• Go >=v1.11
• Containerd >=1.3
• Vagrant >=v2.2
• VirtualBox v6.0 (or any version vagrant is compatible with)

Building nomad-driver-containerd

Make sure your $GOPATH is setup correctly.

$ mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/Roblox
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/Roblox
$ git clone git@github.com:Roblox/nomad-driver-containerd.git
$ cd nomad-driver-containerd
$ make build (This will build your containerd-driver binary)

If you want to compile for arm64, you can run:

make -f Makefile.arm64

Screencast

Wanna try it out!?

$ vagrant up

or vagrant provision if the vagrant VM is already running.

Once setup (vagrant up OR vagrant provision) is complete and the nomad server is up and running, you can check the registered task drivers (which will also show containerd-driver) using:

$ nomad node status (Note down the <node_id>)
$ nomad node status <node_id> | grep containerd-driver

NOTE: setup.sh is part of the vagrant setup and should not be executed directly.

Run Example jobs.

There are few example jobs in the example directory.

$ nomad job run <job_name.nomad>

will launch the job.

More detailed instructions are in the example README.md

To interact with images and containers directly, you can use nerdctl which is a docker compatible CLI for containerd. nerdctl is already installed in the vagrant VM at /usr/local/bin.

Supported options

Driver Config

Task Config

Mount block
  {
   - type (string) (Optional): Supported values are volume, bind or tmpfs. Default: volume.
   - target (string) (Required): Target path in the container.
   - source (string) (Optional): Source path on the host.
   - options ([]string) (Optional): fstab style mount options. NOTE: For bind mounts, atleast rbind and ro are required.
  }

Bind mount example

mounts = [
           {
                type    = "bind"
                target  = "/target/t1"
                source  = "/src/s1"
                options = ["rbind", "ro"]
           }
        ]

In additon to the mounts option in Task Config, you can also mount your volumes into the container using nomad volume_mount stanza

See example job for volume_mount.

Custom seccomp profile example

The default docker seccomp profile found here can be downloaded, and modified (by removing/adding syscalls) to create a custom seccomp profile.
The custom seccomp profile can then be saved under /opt/seccomp/seccomp.json on the Nomad client nodes.

A nomad job can be launched using this custom seccomp profile.

config {
	seccomp         = true
	seccomp_profile = "/opt/seccomp/seccomp.json"
}

Sysctl example

config {
  sysctl = {
    "net.core.somaxconn"  = "16384"
    "net.ipv4.ip_forward" = "1"
  }
}

Authentication (Private registry)

auth stanza allow you to set credentials for your private registry e.g. if you want to pull an image from a private repository in docker hub.
auth stanza can be set either in Driver Config or Task Config or both.
If set at both places, Task Config auth will take precedence over Driver Config auth.

NOTE: In the below example, user and pass are just placeholder values which need to be replaced by actual username and password, when specifying the credentials. Below auth stanza can be used for both Driver Config and Task Config.

auth {
    username = "user"
    password = "pass"
}

Networking

nomad-driver-containerd supports host and bridge networks.

NOTE: host and bridge are mutually exclusive options, and only one of them should be used at a time.

1. Host network can be enabled by setting host_network to true in task config of the job spec (see under Supported options).

2. Bridge network can be enabled by setting the network stanza in the task group section of the job spec.

network {
  mode = "bridge"
}

You need to install CNI plugins on Nomad client nodes under /opt/cni/bin before you can use bridge networks.

Instructions for installing CNI plugins.

 $ curl -L -o cni-plugins.tgz https://github.com/containernetworking/plugins/releases/download/v0.8.6/cni-plugins-linux-amd64-v0.8.6.tgz
 $ sudo mkdir -p /opt/cni/bin
 $ sudo tar -C /opt/cni/bin -xzf cni-plugins.tgz

Also, ensure your Linux operating system distribution has been configured to allow container traffic through the bridge network to be routed via iptables. These tunables can be set as follows:

$ echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/bridge/bridge-nf-call-arptables
$ echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/bridge/bridge-nf-call-ip6tables
$ echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/bridge/bridge-nf-call-iptables

To preserve these settings on startup of a nomad client node, add a file including the following to /etc/sysctl.d/ or remove the file your Linux distribution puts in that directory.

net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-arptables = 1
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 1
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables = 1

Port forwarding

nomad supports both static and dynamic port mapping.

1. Static ports

Static port mapping can be added in the network stanza.

network {
  mode = "bridge"
  port "lb" {
    static = 8889
    to     = 8889
  }
}

Here, host port 8889 is mapped to container port 8889.
NOTE: static ports are usually not recommended, except for system or specialized jobs like load balancers.

2. Dynamic ports

Dynamic port mapping is also enabled in the network stanza.

network {
  mode = "bridge"
  port "http" {
    to = 8080
  }
}

Here, nomad will allocate a dynamic port on the host and that port will be mapped to 8080 in the container.

You can also read more about network stanza in the nomad official documentation

Service discovery

Nomad schedules workloads of various types across a cluster of generic hosts. Because of this, placement is not known in advance and you will need to use service discovery to connect tasks to other services deployed across your cluster. Nomad integrates with Consul to provide service discovery and monitoring.

A service stanza can be added to your job spec, to enable service discovery.

The service stanza instructs Nomad to register a service with Consul.

Tests

If you are running the tests locally, use the vagrant VM provided in the repository.

$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh containerd-linux
$ sudo make test

NOTE: These are destructive tests and can leave the system in a changed state.
It is highly recommended to run these tests either as part of a CI/CD system e.g. circleci or on a immutable infrastructure e.g vagrant VMs.

You can also run an individual test by specifying the test name. e.g.

$ cd tests
$ sudo ./run_tests.sh 001-test-redis.sh

Cleanup

make clean

This will delete your binary: containerd-driver

vagrant destroy

This will destroy your vagrant VM.

Currently supported environments

Ubuntu (>= 16.04)

License

Copyright 2020 Roblox Corporation

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"). For more information read the License.