Deployment to GKE using Docker and Kubernetes

Provision:

This is done once, manually. Replace ENVIRONMENT with the environment you're working with (currently stage and prod are supported).

The scaling limit variables --min-nodes, --max-nodes, and --num-nodes must be set to the appropriate count per zone.

--cluster-version may need to be updated to reflect newer versions of GKE. If you need to do this, visit the GCP web console, Kubernetes Engine section, start to create a new cluster, and check the default version under "Cluster Version".

gcloud beta container clusters create imageserver-ENVIRONMENT --enable-autoscaling --min-nodes=1 --max-nodes=3 --num-nodes=1 --zone=us-central1-a --additional-zones=us-central1-b,us-central1-c --enable-autoupgrade --cluster-version=1.7.8-gke.0

kubectl apply -f deployment/kube/ENVIRONMENT
kubectl get service imageserver # Will show the load balancer IP when it's ready

Build & push:

Builds are performed automatically by CircleCI, and if all tests pass the image will be pushed to GCR. Images are tagged using the branch name and the sha1 of the git commit.

Deploy, plotly.js upgrade, rollback

This is done using plotbot. The following commands provide help:

@plotbot deploy how
@plotbot run how

Font Support

The image server ships with many built-in fonts (see the Dockerfile for a list) and also supports external fonts. External fonts are intended for restrictively licensed fonts that we can not ship as part of the open source release, and may also be used by 3rd party users to install their own fonts (restrictively licensed or open source).

On boot, the image server looks for fonts in /usr/share/fonts/user and will use any valid font found there. You may map a directory into this location in the container.

In GKE, the pod requires a GCE Persistent Disk called plotly-cloud-licensed-fonts that contains the restrictively licensed fonts used by Plotly Cloud. To update fonts:

1. In the PlotlyCloud project, create a disk from the plotly-cloud-licensed-fonts image and attach it to a GCE VM.

2. Reboot the GCE VM, then mount /dev/sdb to a temporary directory.

3. Add/remove/update fonts in this temporary directory.

4. Unmount the temporary directory and detach the disk from the VM.

5. Delete the plotly-cloud-licensed-fonts image and re-create it from the disk.

6. Create new plotly-cloud-licensed-fonts persistent disks from the image:

for zone in us-central1-a us-central1-b us-central1-c ; do
  gcloud compute disks create plotly-cloud-licensed-fonts --image-project=sunlit-shelter-132119 --image=plotly-cloud-licensed-fonts --zone $zone
done

Mapbox Access Token

In order to use the Mapbox functionality built in to plotly.js, a Mapbox access token must be provided. This can be part of the plot JSON, but for cases where it is not included in the plot JSON it is useful to have a default.

To specify one, add it as a Kubernetes secret:

echo -n "pk.whatever.blabla" > /tmp/token
kubectl create secret generic mapbox --from-file=default_access_token=/tmp/token

After adding the secret for the first time or it changes, you'll need to recreate all pods. The easiest way to do this is by running the update_plotlyjs command.