Deploy RisingWave on Kubernetes with Helm

This guide walks you through the process of deploying RisingWave in a single Kubernetes cluster with Helm.

Prerequisites

• Ensure you have Helm 3.7 + installed in your environment. For details about how to install Helm, see the Helm documentation.
• Ensure you have Kubernetes 1.24 or higher installed in your environment.
• Ensure you allocate enough resources for the deployment. For details, see Hardware requirements.

Step 1: Start Kubernetes

Start a Kubernetes cluster. For details about starting a Kubernetes cluster, see Kubernetes’ Getting started guide.

Step 2: Start RisingWave

Now start a RisingWave cluster with Helm.

1. Add the RisingWave Helm chart repository:

   helm repo add risingwavelabs https://risingwavelabs.github.io/helm-charts/ --force-update
   
2. Update your Helm chart repositories to ensure that you are using the RisingWave Helm chart:

   helm repo update
   

   If you are using AWS EKS, you also need to update the local configuration for kubectl and Helm to access your EKS cluster:

   aws eks update-kubeconfig --name <your_eks_cluster_name>
   
3. Create a RisingWave namespace. We recommend creating a dedicated namespace for RisingWave resources.

   kubectl create namespace risingwave
   
4. Customize your configuration for the RisingWave deployment by editing the values.yml file.

   • Customize meta store: The meta store in RisingWave holds metadata for cluster operations. See Configuration for all the available options and Examples for detailed usage of meta stores.
   • Customize state store: The state store in RisingWave serves as a fault-tolerant storage system for preserving system state. See Configuration for all the available options and Examples for detailed usage of state stores.
   • Bundled PostgreSQL and MinIO: If you want to use PostgreSQL as the meta store and MinIO as the state store, the Helm chart for RisingWave offers the option to bundle them together. This allows for a quick and easy setup of the Helm chart. See Configuration for more details. To enable this feature, set tags.bundle=true.

   Before using the bundled PostgreSQL and MinIO, and any local stores, ensure that you have implemented the Dynamic Volume Provisioning.

5. Install the latest RisingWave Helm chart:

   helm install -n risingwave --create-namespace --set wait=true -f values.yaml <my-risingwave> risingwavelabs/risingwave
   

   Where <my-risingwave> is the release name you choose to use for your RisingWave deployment. This command will install the latest stable version of RisingWave. If you want to install a particular version, you can specify the version via the image-tag attribute. Remember to replace <version_number> with the desired version, for example v1.7.0.

   helm install -n risingwave --create-namespace --set wait=true --set image.tag=<version_number> <my-risingwave> -f values.yaml risingwavelabs/risingwave
   

   You may get an output message like this:

   NAME: my-risingwave
   LAST DEPLOYED: Wed Aug 16 15:35:19 2023
   NAMESPACE: default
   STATUS: deployed
   REVISION: 1
   TEST SUITE: None
   
6. Use the following command to check the deployment status:

   kubectl -n risingwave get pods -l app.kubernetes.io/instance=<my-risingwave>
   

   When your status looks like below, it means the RisingWave cluster starts successfully:

   NAME                                   READY   STATUS    RESTARTS        AGE
   risingwave-compactor-8dd799db6-hdjjz   1/1     Running   1 (8m33s ago)   11m
   risingwave-compute-0                   2/2     Running   0               11m
   risingwave-postgresql-0                1/1     Running   0               11m
   risingwave-frontend-7bd7b8c856-czdgd   1/1     Running   1 (8m33s ago)   11m
   risingwave-meta-0                      1/1     Running   0               11m
   risingwave-minio-5cfd8f5f64-6msqm      1/1     Running   0               11m
   

Step 3: Access RisingWave

By default, the RisingWave Helm Chart will deploy a ClusterIP service that enables the cluster-local communication.

Once deployed, you can forward your local machine’s port 4567 to the service’s port via:

kubectl -n risingwave port-forward svc/my-risingwave 4567:svc

You can then connect to RisingWave using a PostgreSQL client on port 4567. For example:

psql -h localhost -p 4567 -d dev -U root

Step 4: Monitor performance

You can monitor the RisingWave cluster using the monitoring stack. For details, see Monitoring a RisingWave cluster.

Optional: Resize a node

By editing the configurations in values.yml, you can resize a worker node. The compactor node configurations are in the compactorComponent section. Configurations for the meta node and compute node are in metaComponent and computeComponent sections respectively. See Customize pods of different components for details.

# To resize other types of node, please replace the name with
# computeComponent, or metaComponent.
compactorComponent:
  resources:
    # The maximum amount of CPU and memory the Pod can use.
    limits:
      cpu: 1
      memory: 2Gi
    # The minimum amount of CPU and memory that the Pod is guaranteed to have.
    requests:
      # 0.1 cores
      cpu: 100m
      memory: 64Mi

Please note that increasing the CPU resource will not automatically increase the parallelism of existing materialized views. When scaling up (adding more CPU cores) a compute node, you should perform the scaling by following the instructions in Cluster scaling.