I spent the last week or so building Docker images and a set of YAML files that allows one to run SReview, my 99%-automated video review and transcode system, inside minikube, a program that sets up a mini Kubernetes cluster inside a VM for development purposes.

I wish the above paragraph would say "inside Kubernetes", but alas, unless your Kubernetes implementation has a ReadWriteMany volume that can be used from multiple nodes, this is not quite the case yet. In order to fix that, I am working on adding an abstraction layer that will transparently download files from an S3-compatible object store; but until that is ready, this work is not yet useful for large installations.

But that's fine! If you're wanting to run SReview for a small conference, you can do so with minikube. It won't have the redundancy and reliability things that proper Kubernetes provides you, but then you don't really need that for a conference of a few days.

Here's what you do:

• Download minikube (see the link above)
• Run minikube start, and wait for it to finish
• Run minikube addon enable ingress
• Clone the SReview git repository
• From the toplevel of that repository, run perl -I lib scripts/sreview-config -a dump|sensible-pager to see an overview of the available configuration options.
• Edit the file dockerfiles/kube/master.yaml to add your configuration variables, following the instructions near the top
• Once the file is configured to your liking, run kubectl apply -f master.yaml -f storage-minikube.yaml
• Add sreview.example.com to /etc/hosts, and have it point to the output of minikube ip.
• Create preroll and postroll templates, and download them to minikube in the location that the example config file suggests. Hint: minikube ssh has wget.
• Store your raw recorded assets under /mnt/vda1/inputdata, using the format you specified for the $inputglob and $parse_re configuration values.
• Profit!

This doesn't explain how to add a schedule to the database. My next big project (which probably won't happen until after the next FOSDEM is to add a more advanced administrator's interface, so that you can just log in and add things from there. For now though, you have to run kubectl port-forward svc/sreview-database 5432, and then use psql to localhost to issue SQL commands. Yes, that sucks.

Having said that, if you're interested in trying this out, give it a go. Feedback welcome!

(many thanks to the people on the #debian-devel IRC channel for helping me understand how Kubernetes is supposed to work -- wouldn't have worked nearly as nice without them)

About a week and a half ago, I mentioned that I'd been working on making SReview, my AGPLv3 video review and transcode system work from inside a Kubernetes cluster. I noted at the time that while I'd made it work inside minikube, it couldn't actually be run from within a real Kubernetes cluster yet, mostly because I misunderstood how Kubernetes works, and assumed you could just mount the same Kubernetes volume from multiple pods, and share data that way (answer: no you can't).

The way to fix that is to share the data not through volumes, but through something else. That would require that the individual job containers download and upload files somehow.

I had a look at how the Net::Amazon::S3 perl module works (answer: it's very simple really) and whether it would be doable to add a transparent file access layer to SReview which would access files either on the local file system, or an S3 service (answer: yes).

So, as of yesterday or so, SReview supports interfacing with an S3 service (only tested with MinIO for now) rather than "just" files on the local file system. As part of that, I also updated the code so it would not re-scan all files every time the sreview-detect job for detecting new files runs, but only when the "last changed" time (or mtime for local file system access) has changed -- otherwise it would download far too many files every time.

This turned out to be a lot easier than I anticipated, and I have now successfully managed, using MinIO, to run a full run of a review cycle inside Kubernetes, without using any volumes except for the "ReadWriteOnce" ones backing the database and MinIO containers.

Additionally, my kubernetes configuration files are now split up a bit (so you can apply the things that make sense for your configuration somewhat more easily), and are (somewhat) tested.

If you want to try out SReview and you've already got Kubernetes up and running, this may be for you! Please give it a try and don't forget to send some feedback my way.