Running simple Elasticsearch + Kibana on minikube or kubernetes

To test a small application I needed an Elasticsearch and Kibana to visualize the data, as this application is running on a minikube I’ve decided to create this Elasticsearch + Kibana stack on minikube. This is a pretty simple setup and suitable for a development environment only.

To create the Elasticsearch I used a stateful set to persist the data on my local machine under the dir /mnt/data (see volumes definition):

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: StatefulSet
metadata:
  name: elasticsearch
spec:
  serviceName: "elasticsearch"
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: elasticsearch
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: elasticsearch
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: elasticsearch
        image: docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:6.6.1
        env:
        - name: discovery.type
          value: single-node
        ports:
        - containerPort: 9200
          name: client
        - containerPort: 9300
          name: nodes
        volumeMounts:
        - name: data
          mountPath: /usr/share/elasticsearch/data
      volumes:
      - name: data
        hostPath:
          path: /mnt/data
          type: Directory
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: elasticsearch
  labels:
    service: elasticsearch
spec:
  ports:
  - port: 9200
    name: client
  - port: 9300
    name: nodes
  selector:
    app: elasticsearch

Then, create the StatefulSet and Service:

kubectl create -f es-stafulset.yml

Note that this will create only one replica and I defined the environmental variable “discovery.type” to “single-node” to run with only one replica. This will expose the service using the name elasticsearch, I decided to do that because usually this is the name used by Kibana and other application to automatically discover the elasticsearch cluster.

Now, the kibana configuration:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: kibana-deployment
  labels:
    app: kibana
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: kibana
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: kibana
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: kibana
        image: docker.elastic.co/kibana/kibana:6.6.1
        ports:
        - containerPort: 5601
          name: webinterface
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: kibana
  labels:
    service: kibana
spec:
  type: NodePort
  ports:
  - port: 5601
    name: webinterface
  selector:
    app: kibana

The Kibana configuration is simpler than elasticsearch as I’m using just to visualize the data, I had no need to persist the kibana data, so the only detail is that the service is being exposed using NodePort. To create the deployment and service we can run:

kubectl create -f kibana-deployment.yml

After deploying the kibana deployment we can get the node port running:

kubectl get services -o wide

With the nodeport we should be able to access kibana on the browser.