GeoServer on Kubernetes:

Set up and Operate a

GeoServer Cluster in K8s

Alessandro Parma
Simone Giannecchini
Luis E. Bermudez
GeoSolutions
 Contents
⚫ About us
⚫ What is GeoServer?
⚫ What is Kubernetes?
⚫ Key Concepts
⚫ Running GeoServer on Kubernetes
⚫ Conclusions

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 About Us

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 GeoSolutions
⚫ Founded in 2006, offices in Italy & US
⚫ Our core products

GeoNode

⚫ Our offer

Enterprise Deployment Customized Professional

Support Services Subscription Solutions Training
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 Trusted by more than 200 clients

• UN FAO (CIOK, FIGIS, NRL, FORESTRY, ESTG), UN WFP, World Bank, DLR, EUMETSAT,
JRC, ARPAT, NATO CMRE, UNESCO, IGAD, UNEP, etc..
• BAYER, BASF, DigitalGlobe, MDA, TOPCON, SwissRE, e-GEOS, Halliburton, etc..

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 Industries

Natural
Space MetOcean Defense
Resources

Emergency
OpenData Government Utilities
Response

Smart
Research
Cities

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Associations

We strongly support Open

Source, it Is in our core

We actively participate in
OGC working groups and get
funded to advance new
open standards

We support standards
critical to GEOINT

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 Our Distinctive Traits
⚫ Lead Developers of GeoNode, GeoServer, MapStore and
GeoNetwork
⚫ Vast experience with Raster Serving
⚫ Designed and developed JAI-Ext
⚫ Designed and developed ImageIO-Ext
⚫ Design and Developed most raster code in GeoTools/GeoServer
⚫ Vast Experience with Vector Data Serving
⚫ WFS, WMS, Vector Tiles with OGV
⚫ Extensive Experience with Spatial DBMS
⚫ Oracle, SQL Server, Postgis, MongoDB, etc..
⚫ Extensive Experience with creating webgis applications
⚫ OpenLayers, Leaflet, Cesium, MapboxGL
⚫ Ext-JS, JQuery, Bootstrap, Angular, React, Redux
⚫ Extensive Experience with OGC Protocols
⚫ Extensive Experience in Performance and Scalability (Big Data
and Cloud)
⚫ Unparalleled multi-industry experience

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 Team – Key Members
30+ Staff Members, 25+ Software Engineers
⚫ Andrea Aime: GeoServer Project Steering Committee, GeoTools
PMC, JAI-Tools Lead, ImageIO-Ext committer
⚫ Simone Giannecchini: Founder, GeoServer PSC, GeoTools PMC,
ImageIO-Ext Architect, JAI-Tools founder
⚫ Luis E. Bermudez: US CEO since 2020. 2010-2020 OGC Exec,
Director of the Innovation and Compliance Programs.
⚫ Giovanni Allegri: Senior Project Manager, QGIS, GeoNode
⚫ Alessio Fabiani: Founder, GeoServer PSC, GeoTools Committer,
MapStore Committer
⚫ Emanuele Tajariol: GeoServer Committer, GeoTools Committer,
GeoNetwork PSC
⚫ Mauro Bartolomeoli: GeoServer Committer, GeoTools Comitter,
GeoBatch Committer, MapStore Architect
⚫ Lorenzo Natali: MapStore2 Technical Lead
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 We are hiring!
⚫ You are fond on Open Source
⚫ If you are fond on
GeoServer|GeoNode|MapStore|QGIS
⚫ If you like an international environment (both
clients and colleagues)
⚫ If you like a challenging position
⚫ Send us your resume → multiple positions:
⚫ DevOps Engineer
⚫ Senior Frontend SW Engineer
⚫ Java SW Engineer
⚫ Support Engineer
⚫ Python SW Engineer
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What is GeoServer?
(really??)

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 What is GeoServer?
⚫ GeoSpatial enterprise gateway
• Java Enterprise
• Management and Dissemination of
raster and vector data
⚫ Standards compliant
• OGC WCS 1.0, 1.1.1 (RI), 2.0
• OGC WFS 1.0, 1.1 (RI), 2.0
• OGC WMS 1.1.1, 1.3.0
• OGC WPS 1.0.0
• OGC CSW 2.0.1 (ebRIM)
⚫ Google Earth/Maps support
• KML, GeoSearch, etc..

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 What is GeoServer?
----------
PNG, GIF
Shapefile ----------
---------- JPEG
---------
----------
----------
---------
WMS TIFF,
----------
Vector files
GeoTIFF
PostGIS SVG, PDF
Oracle Styled
H2 KML maps
KML/KMZ
DB2
SQL Server
GeoPackage Shapefile
MySql GML2

GeoServer
WFS
Spatialite
Elastic GML3
MongoDB GeoRSS
DBMS CSW Raw vector GeoJSON
data
CSV/XLS
WPS
GeoPackage
WFS GeoTIFF
ArcGrid
WCS GTopo30
Servers
Raw raster
Img+World
GeoTIFF ESRI data
WMS REST
ArcGrid
Img+world KML superoverlays
Mosaic WMTS, Google maps tiles
MrSID Raster files TMS
JPEG 2000 OGC tiles
ECW,Pyramid, Oracle GeoRaster, PostGis Raster, NetCDF OSGEO tiles
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What is Kubernetes?

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 What is Kubernetes
⚫ Kubernetes is an open source platform to
manage containerized workloads and
services
⚫ Developed by Google
⚫ Based on their experience with Borg
⚫ Manages a cluster of nodes running
Containerized applications
⚫ Helps you manage and scale your applications

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 What is a Container
⚫ What is a container then?
⚫ Type of virtualization that happens at the
operating system level
⚫ Applications can run in an isolated user
spaces called containers
⚫ Implemented at the kernel level, multiple
containers share the same OS kernel

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 Containers vs VMs
⚫ How does it compare to VMs?
⚫ VMs
⚫ Each individual VM has its own full OS
⚫ Hypervisor abstracting and managing resources
⚫ Typically, multiple applications running in the
same VM
⚫ Looks pretty much like a dedicated machine
⚫ Pretty much transparent for Devs and Ops (with
extra flexibility)

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 Containers vs VMs
⚫ How does it compare to VMs?
⚫ Containers
⚫ Common, shared, OS kernel
⚫ Multiple containers (possibly from multiple
projects) on the same machine
⚫ The OS provides isolation and security
⚫ Has its own idiosyncrasies, tools, skillset..
⚫ Usually run one application per container
⚫ The application is bundled with its
dependencies and runs in its own isolated user
space (the “image”)

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 Containers vs VMs
⚫ How does it compare to VMs?

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 Why is it relevant?
⚫ Traditional deployments
⚫ No resource boundaries → some applications
starve for resources
⚫ Can’t easily reallocate resources after the initial
setup
⚫ Virtual Machines
⚫ Multiple VMs on the same server → better
resource utilization
⚫ Better isolation
⚫ Each VM has a copy of the OS

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 Why is it relevant?
⚫ Containers
⚫ shared kernel with isolated userspace
⚫ each container has its own filesystem, a share of
CPU cores
⚫ decoupled from they underlying infrastructure →
portable across distributions and cloud providers
⚫ …

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 Why is it relevant?

⚫ …
⚫ fast image creation and easy rollback
compared to VMs → Good fit for frequent
deployments and CI/CD
⚫ separation of concerns between Devs and
Ops
⚫ consistency across development in multiple
environments

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Why Kubernetes?

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 Why Kubernetes?
⚫ To manage the containers that run your
applications in production with no downtime
⚫ Takes care of running your application
containers on a distributed system
⚫ Takes care of scaling (both the application
and the nodes cluster) and failover

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 Why Kubernetes?
⚫ Also provides
⚫ Service discovery and load balancing
⚫ Storage Orchestration: mount storage of
choice)
⚫ Automated rollouts and rollbacks. You describe
the desired state for your containers
⚫ Self Healing: restart failing containers, hide
them until they are ready state, ..
⚫ Configuration management and Secrets
management: change config without rebuilding
the application
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 How does it compare to..
⚫ There are other orchestrators and tools
available to manage containers
⚫ Docker Compose
⚫ allows you to define services as collections but
that is pretty much it
⚫ Docker Swarm
⚫ gives you to work on a distributed environment
⚫ services definition and commands are somewhat
similar to compose
⚫ not as sophisticated (and complex! as K8s)

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 How does it compare to..
⚫ Rancher
⚫ Started before K8s became so popular
⚫ Had it’s own “engine” to run containers
(“Cattle”)
⚫ Rancher 2 is a different, it is used to deploy
and manage K8s cluster

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 Resources
⚫ What is Kubernetes
⚫ Borg: The Predecessor to Kubernetes
⚫ Containerization
⚫ What is a Container
⚫ Docker Compose
⚫ Docker Swarm
⚫ Rancher

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Kubernetes Key Concepts

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Kubernetes Architecture

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 Kubernetes Key concepts
⚫ Kubernetes manages a set of cluster nodes
(“workers”) running containerized applications
⚫ The Control Pane manages the pods and the
worker nodes
⚫ API Server
⚫ Scheduler
⚫ Controller Managers

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 Kubernetes Key concepts
⚫ The Worker Nodes host our pods
⚫ Kubelet - makes sure that containers are running
in a Pod
⚫ Proxy – communication with pods in and out of
the cluster
⚫ Container Runtime - software that is responsible
for running containers (docker, containerd, …)

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 Pods
⚫ A Pod is basically a group of Docker
containers with shared namespaces and
filesystem volumes
⚫ You can have more that one container running
in a pod. They will be co-located and tightly
coupled
⚫ Example: content serving container with a
sidecar container that is updating the content
⚫ Pods can be scaled horizontally to run
multiple instances of the same applications i.e.
multiple replicas of the pod

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 Pods

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 Controllers
⚫ Controllers for a given resource manages the
state of the resource
⚫ Replicas
⚫ Rollout
⚫ Healing
⚫ ..
⚫ Node failure → creates a replacement pod
⚫ Deployment
⚫ Statefulset
⚫ DaemonSet
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 Resource Definitions
⚫ Resources are defined in Manifests with
YAML syntax

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Quick Start

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 Set up K8s cluster
⚫ Minikube to quickly spin up a local
Kubernetes Cluster
⚫ Compatible with multiple Oses
⚫ Cloud Service all major cloud providers offer
Kubernetes as a managed service
⚫ AWS
⚫ Google Cloud
⚫ Azure
⚫ Digital Ocean

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 Containerize GeoServer
⚫ We’ll need a docker image GeoServer
⚫ Many Images available on the Hub
⚫ GeoSolutions one here with sources here
⚫ Community image is a WIP
⚫ Most of the work already done
⚫ Based on Tomcat images
⚫ Built periodically by Docker Hub
⚫ Readily usable, just change the webapp

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Example K8s deployment

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 Example K8s deployment
⚫ Passive Cluster with Backoffice instance
⚫ GeoServer is defined as a StatefulSets
⚫ Dedicated resources for backoffice and slave
⚫ Secrets for sensitive data
⚫ Master password
⚫ Database connection details
⚫ Volumes
⚫ Abstracting the underlying storage
⚫ Provide different StorageClasses

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 GeoServer StatefulSet
⚫ GeoServer StatefulSet
⚫ Statefulset contains the Pod definition
⚫ Sets the number of replicas
⚫ Health checks
⚫ References to Volumes
⚫ ConfigMap
⚫ Secrets
⚫ Environment Variables
⚫ …
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StatefulSet Definition – Pt 1

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StatefulSet Definition – Pt 2

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 Shared Volumes
⚫ Shared Volumes
⚫ Accessible by multiple nodes
⚫ GeoServer datadirs
⚫ Cached tiles
⚫ Spatial Data

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 Non-Shared Volumes
⚫ Local Storage
⚫ Visible only to pods running on the same node
⚫ Fast read writes for ephemeral data
⚫ Be prepared to loose the data at any time
⚫ Good fit for Logs and Audit files

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Volumes, CMs and Secrets

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 Other Resources
⚫ Kubernetes Jobs and DeamonSets to run
tasks in your cluster (Cleanup logs and audit
files)

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 Scaling your Pods
⚫ Manually scaling your StatefulSets

⚫Use K8s Horizontal Pod Autoscaler

and Scale based on metrics like CPU

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Conclusions

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 Conclusions
⚫ Containers are changing the way we deploy
applications
⚫ You can run GeoServer in Kubernetes
⚫ There are readily available images for GeoServer
on the Docker Hub
⚫ A K8s deployment of a GeoServer cluster requires
you to define many resources Statefulsets,
Volumes, Secrets, ..
⚫ Choose the appropriate StorageClass for each
Volume

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 That’s all folks!

Questions?
info@geosolutionsgroup.com

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