Deploy Vespa Locally

Vespa on Kubernetes can be deployed locally using MiniKube for development and experimental use-cases.

Note: This setup is not recommended for production.

Initialize a Minikube cluster with 8 nodes, each with 4GiB of memory and 2 CPUs. Enable Minikube's image registry add-on to allow the Minikube nodes to access the Vespa images. In this example, we use podman as the driver.

minikube start --nodes 8 --cpus 2 --memory 4GiB --driver=podman --insecure-registry="192.168.49.0/24"
minikube addons enable registry

Cache the images provided by our support team into the MiniKube registry.

echo $VESPAAI_REGISTRY_TOKEN | podman login images.ves.pa \
  -u "$VESPAAI_REGISTRY_USER" \
  --password-stdin

podman pull images.ves.pa/kubernetes/vespa:$VESPA_VERSION
podman pull images.ves.pa/kubernetes/operator:$VESPA_VERSION

Then, push the images to the MiniKube registry. The images will then be accessible from $(minikube ip):5000.

export MINIKUBE_REGISTRY=$(minikube ip)

podman tag  kubernetes/vespa:$VESPA_VERSION $MINIKUBE_REGISTRY:5000/localhost/kubernetes/vespa:$VESPA_VERSION
podman push --tls-verify=false $MINIKUBE_REGISTRY:5000/localhost/kubernetes/vespa:$VESPA_VERSION

podman tag  kubernetes/operator:$VESPA_VERSION $MINIKUBE_REGISTRY:5000/localhost/kubernetes/operator:$VESPA_VERSION
podman push --tls-verify=false $MINIKUBE_REGISTRY:5000/localhost/kubernetes/operator:$VESPA_VERSION

We will now use the following environment variables for the rest of the guide to refer to the images.

export VESPA_IMAGE=$MINIKUBE_REGISTRY:5000/localhost/kubernetes/vespa
export VESPA_OPERATOR_IMAGE=$MINIKUBE_REGISTRY:5000/localhost/kubernetes/operator

Then, install the Local Persistent Volume Helm Chart. This will allow provisioning Persistent Volumes locally, which is required to run Vespa on Kubernetes. Helm will automatically create a StorageClass called local-storage, which should be used as the StorageClass for subsequent steps.

$ git clone git@github.com:kubernetes-sigs/sig-storage-local-static-provisioner.git

# Install the Helm Chart onto the cluster globally
$ cd sig-storage-local-static-provisioner
$ helm install -f helm/examples/baremetal-default-storage.yaml local-volume-provisioner --namespace kube-system ./helm/provisioner

Create several usable volumes on each MiniKube Node. We recommend at least 4 per node for a smooth deployment.

# Create several volumes on each Minikube node.
$ for n in minikube minikube-m02 minikube-m03 minikube-m04 minikube-m05 minikube-m06 minikube-m07 minikube-m08; do
  echo "==> $n"
  minikube ssh -n "$n" -- '
    set -e
    for i in 1 2 3 4; do
      sudo mkdir -p /mnt/disks/vol$i
      if ! mountpoint -q /mnt/disks/vol$i; then
        sudo mount --bind /mnt/disks/vol$i /mnt/disks/vol$i
      fi
    done
    echo "Mounted:"
    mount | grep -E "/mnt/disks/vol[1-4]" || true
  '
done

Once the images are available in the MiniKube registry, proceed to the Installation guide, using local-storage as the storageClass and NONE as the endpointType.