What is kube-volttron?

Kube-volttron is a collection of yaml manifests and other files that deploy a version of the Volttron energy management platform, rearchitected as a collection of microservices, into the Kubernetes cloud-native container orchestration environment. It was build as an experiment to show how Kubernetes could be used to deploy an energy management service consisting of a central node that stores data and provides web access and nodes on remote sites where IoT protocols are used to communicate state and control to energy control devices. By default, the Volttron images deployed by kube-volttron are prepackaged collections of Volttron agents built with the microservice-volttron github repo. The microservice-volttron github repo is not yet publically available; however demo microservices are downloaded from the jkempf42/public-repo Docker image repo by the deployment manifests. Microservice-volttron allows subsets of Volttron agents to be packaged and preconfigured into redistributable binary container images, with the final configuration being done in the deployment context. The result is a re-architecting of Volttron from a legacy, monolithic, deploy and run on one machine application to a modern application with a modular, microservices architecture.

The kube-volttron cluster is built from a central node running in a cloud or on prem VM or server connected to a node at a remote site, called the gateway node, through a VPN. The central node runs the Volttron Central agent which handles the Web UI and an SQL-lite historian. The gateway node monitors a collection of devices using an IoT protocol (BACnet in the demo), an Actuator agent to handle commands to the devices, and a forwarding historian to send data to the central node. The repo was tested with two different execution environment options: both the central and gateway nodes running in VirtualBox VMs locally, and the central node running in a Azure VM while the gateway node is running in a VirtualBox VM locally. Instructions are provided in the cluster-config/README.md file for setting up the cluster base in these two execution environments, but most instructions should generalize to other environments.

Follow these steps (performed in the order specified here) to get kube-volttron up and running:

• Change to the cluster-config directory and follow the instructions in the cluster-config/README.md file to create the central and gateway nodes and build a Kubernetes cluster.

• Change to the central-node directory and follow the instructions in the README.md file to deploy Volttron Central with SQL-lite historian on your central node. Note that the default central node deployment stores the SQL-lite database in a file on the central node VM. Manifests are provided in the central-node directory and the postgres subdirectory for deploying with Postgres but since the default vcentral container image does not have Postgres built in, they can't be used and are not discussed in the deployment instructions. Adding Postgres is a future enhancement.

• Once your Volttron Central is deployed, change to the gateway-node directory and follow the directions in the README.md file to deploy the gateway node.

Versions

The following versions of software packages were used to build kube-volttron. Your mileage may vary if you choose to use different versions:

• operating system: Ubuntu 20.04
• wireguard: wireguard-tools 1.0.20200513
• kubeadm: 1.24.2
• kubectl: 1.24.2
• kubelet: 1.24.2
• kubernetes-cni: 0.8.7
• cri-tools: 1.23.0
• containerd: 1.5.9
• flannel: 0.17.0
• multus: 3.8

The microservice-volttron container images were built from a deep fork of the volttron-docker version 3.2 repo.

Notes on the suitability of kube-volttron for production deployment.

The yaml manifests in the central-node and gateway-node directories pull demo prebuilt images from the Docker hub jkempf42/public-repo. If you decide to develop your own Volttron microservice containers, you will need to replace the name of the container image in the manifests under the spec.template.containers.image key in the Deployment manifests, which is currently set to jkempf42/public-repo:<image type tag>, with your own repository and image tag.

The demo vcentral, vremote, and vbac images in jkempf42/public-repo have been build with an Ubuntu 20.04 image loaded with debugging tools, especially for network debugging (traceroute, ping, dig, etc.). Once microservice-volttron is made public, you should modify the Dockerfiles at microservice-volttron to produce smaller images, and maybe use a smaller base OS image like alpine, if you plan to use kube-volttron in production.

Finally, kube-volttron was developed with ease of demoability in mind and not with security. If there is enough interest from the community, I'll continue working on it and add security features over time. But if you decide to deploy kube-volttron for real, you should go through the directions in this repo with a fine toothed comb, ensuring file and directory permissions are properly set and Internet connections are properly secured. Some effort was made to set file permissions for security but it was not consistent. Also, you should make use of the powerful Kubernetes security tools like Secret objects, RBAC control, and using separate namespaces for different tenants to ensure that only entites that are allowed can access their services in the cluster. Finally, the demo images have self-signed certs built in, and they are not appropriate for production use. So let me repeat: kube-volttron is for demo purposes only, it is not for production deployment! It was built as an experiment and security is set to make demoing easy. You will need to do some additional work before you can deploy it in production.