Skip to content

Using Randomization for Pulumi Kubernetes Resources

Logical Names馃敆

Pulumi requires unique logical names (URN) for tracking the state of resources. I ran into an issue with this once I expanded to a multi-cluster deployment since Pulumi began erroring on the logical name not being unique. Let's say you are defining a service:

_, err = corev1.NewService(
        ctx,
        "myservice", // 馃憟馃憟馃憟馃憟 this is the logical name
        &corev1.ServiceArgs{
            ApiVersion: pulumi.String("v1"),
            Kind:       pulumi.String("Service"),
            Metadata:   &metav1.ObjectMetaArgs{
                Namespace: pulumi.String(myNamespace),
                Name:      pulumi.String(myAppName), // 馃憟馃憟馃憟馃憟 This is the physical name
            },
)

You can normally omit the Metadata.Name and Pulumi will autogenerate this with a randomized suffix for you. This allows a style of "create before destroy" deployments you don't get with native kubectl apply style commands. Things get a little messy here as overriding the logical name requires a normal String.

To allow maximum uniqueness, you can concatenate values in the logical name so that it's unique as you desire, such as resourcename + cluster for example.

Using Random馃敆

Having used Terraform's random provider in the past, and found it incredibly helpful to stop relying on the uniqueness of names that I have to manage, I tried initially to do this with the Pulumi terraform version of random. It didn't work out too well. In the end, I realized this is where just having the power of the language itself makes perfect sense. I had a pointer from someone in this github discussion about using the petname package itself, but I didn't like that idea as it was a bit unwieldy and not designed for importing as a package. Trying to use the resource results in a problem as pulumi.StringOutput can't be used with string concantenation. Instead, you have to use the ApplyT and pass around the string output to other inputs accepting pulumi.StringPtr type.

petname.ID().ApplyT(func(id pulumi.ID) string {
                return fmt.Sprintf("%v", id)
}).(pulumi.StringOutput)

This doesn't work because the output is still a pulumi.StringOutput and not a string.

This would work for things like the physical name, but you can't get the string output as it's to be considered like a "promise" and not resolved till the end of the plan. Logical names require strings, not pulumi.String.

Go Makes it Simple馃敆

I did a little searching for correctly converting strings into int hashes, and with the volume of deployments, a collision risk is ridiculously low (something like 1 in 1 billion?).

Here's how I went about it. You can adapt this for your Pulumi plan. I went back to one of my favorites, gofakeit which provides a fantastic package for generating data. What's cool about this is that the generators offer a global Seed option so you can reliably regenerate the same random data.

Setup馃敆

@brianvoe on github did a great job with this gofakeit package.

go get "github.com/brianvoe/gofakeit/v6"

Add this to your imports

import (
    "github.com/brianvoe/gofakeit/v6"
)

Now for the hashing, I found a great MIT licensed library I grabbed two functions from here: util by @shomali11 on github

// FNV64a hashes using fnv64a algorithm
//
// Sourced from: https://github.com/shomali11/util/blob/master/xhashes/xhashes.go
func FNV64a(text string) uint64 {
    algorithm := fnv.New64a()
    return uint64Hasher(algorithm, text)
}

// uint64Hasher returns a uint64
//
// Sourced from: https://github.com/shomali11/util/blob/master/xhashes/xhashes.go
func uint64Hasher(algorithm hash.Hash64, text string) uint64 {
    algorithm.Write([]byte(text))
    return algorithm.Sum64()
}

I set up a few methods on a configuration struct.

// Clusters returns a list of clusters.
type Clusters struct {
    Name string `json:"name,omitempty"`
}
// setSeed sets the gofakeit global state to a specific
// seed value based on the string input.
func setSeed(s string) {
    calcSeed := FNV64a(s)
    v := int64(calcSeed)
    gofakeit.Seed(v)
}
// animalString returns a string formatted with `{DescriptiveAdjective}-{Animal}`.
func animalString() string {
    animal := gofakeit.Animal()
    adjective := gofakeit.AdjectiveDescriptive()
    return strings.ToLower(strings.Join([]string{adjective, animal}, "-"))
}

Now, once you load a configuration into the struct using the Pulumi configuration package, you can obtain a randomized petname on demand, that will be repeatable and only change if the cluster name is different.

{{< admonition type="Tip" title="If your uniqueness requirements change..." open=true >}}

If your business requirements for uniqueness change, such as a combination of resource+cluster now needing to be deployed in duplication across another namespace (for example for provisioning development environments on demand)... you can just change the input seed from cluster to a combination of other values and you'll generate new unique seeds from there.

{{< /admonition >}}

// PetName returns a unique petname for logical resources to be uniquely named in the Pulumi state file.
// This is formatted as `adjective-animal`.
// For logical name purposes, use the PetNameSuffix method instead.
func (c *Clusters) PetName() string {
    // Calculate a seed value based on cluster name and then generate a random petname for the reosurces so that the logical names stay truly unique even in multi-cluster environments.
  setSeed(c.Name)
    randomPet := animalString() // Random based on seed, so should be repeatable for different deploys.
    return randomPet
}

// PetName returns a unique petname suffix for easy string concantenation for logical resources.
// This is formatted as `-adjective-animal` with a preceding.
// You'd join like `_, err = appsv1.NewDeployment(ctx, "myapp" + config.PetNameSuffix(), nil)
func (c *Clusters) PetNameSuffix() string {
    // Calculate a seed value based on cluster name and then generate a random petname for the reosurces so that the logical names stay truly unique even in multi-cluster environments.
  setSeed(c.Name)
    return "-" + animalString() // Random based on seed, so should be repeatable for different deploys.
}

Quick and Dirty Option馃敆

If you just want to do it all in main() and ignore the frowning of the "best practice police" just inline it.

calcSeed := FNV64a(cluster.Name)
v := int64(calcSeed)
gofakeit.Seed(v)
animal := gofakeit.Animal()
adjective := gofakeit.AdjectiveDescriptive()
randomPetCalc := strings.ToLower(strings.Join([]string{adjective, animal}, "-"))
fmt.Printf("Random Pet Calculated at Runtime: %s\n", randomPetCalc)

Using in Loop馃敆

Note that this would probably have issues if you were trying to update the seed in goroutines as I believe it's a global variable. However, it works great when you need to do something like this:

for _, cluster := range clusterList {
    suffix := cluster.PetNameSuffix()
    err = ingress.NetworkingIngress(ctx, suffix) // ... etc
}

Wrap-Up馃敆

I got here thanks to the help of folks in the Pulumi slack + Github discussions. I've found it's a common question. I recommended they beef up some good examples of using the random provider like this. However, I'm not certain it fits Pulumi's "promise" model quite the same as it was with Terraform. I'm not versed enough in the architecture to understand why it worked for Terraform but not with Pulumi, but this "workaround" using normal Go code seems to work fine. I'm really appreciating the value of having access to a full fledged programming language in my infrastructure work, including Kubernetes, even if this entails a little more complexity up front.

Further Reading馃敆