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Deploy TiDB on Google Cloud

This document is designed to be directly run in Google Cloud Shell.

It takes you through the following steps:

  • Launch a new 3-node Kubernetes cluster (optional)
  • Deploy TiDB Operator and your first TiDB cluster
  • Connect to the TiDB cluster
  • Scale out the TiDB cluster
  • Access the Grafana dashboard
  • Destroy the TiDB cluster
  • Shut down the Kubernetes cluster (optional)

Select a project

This tutorial launches a 3-node Kubernetes cluster of n1-standard-1 machines. Pricing information can be found here.

Please select a project before proceeding:

Enable API access

This tutorial requires use of the Compute and Container APIs. Please enable them before proceeding:

Configure gcloud defaults

This step defaults gcloud to your preferred project and zone, which simplifies the commands used for the rest of this tutorial:

gcloud config set project {{project-id}}

gcloud config set compute/zone us-west1-a

Launch a 3-node Kubernetes cluster

It's now time to launch a 3-node kubernetes cluster! The following command launches a 3-node cluster of n1-standard-1 machines.

It takes a few minutes to complete:

gcloud container clusters create tidb

Once the cluster has launched, set it to be the default:

gcloud config set container/cluster tidb

The last step is to verify that kubectl can connect to the cluster, and all three machines are running:

kubectl get nodes

If you see Ready for all nodes, congratulations! You've set up your first Kubernetes cluster.

Install Helm

Helm is a package management tool for Kubernetes.

  1. Install the Helm client:

    curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/master/scripts/get-helm-3 | bash

  2. Add the PingCAP repository:

    helm repo add pingcap https://charts.pingcap.org/

Deploy TiDB Operator

TiDB Operator uses Custom Resource Definition (CRD) to extend Kubernetes. Therefore, to use TiDB Operator, you must first create the TidbCluster CRD.

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pingcap/tidb-operator/v1.1.15/manifests/crd.yaml && \
kubectl get crd tidbclusters.pingcap.com

After the TidbCluster CRD is created, install TiDB Operator in your Kubernetes cluster.

kubectl create namespace tidb-admin
helm install --namespace tidb-admin tidb-operator pingcap/tidb-operator --version v1.1.15
kubectl get po -n tidb-admin -l app.kubernetes.io/name=tidb-operator

Deploy the TiDB cluster

To deploy the TiDB cluster, perform the following steps:

  1. Create Namespace:

    kubectl create namespace demo

  2. Deploy the TiDB cluster:

    kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pingcap/tidb-operator/v1.1.15/examples/basic/tidb-cluster.yaml -n demo

  3. Deploy the TiDB cluster monitor:

    kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pingcap/tidb-operator/v1.1.15/examples/basic/tidb-monitor.yaml -n demo

  4. View the Pod status:

    kubectl get po -n demo

Connect to the TiDB cluster

There can be a small delay between the pod being up and running, and the service being available. You can view the service status using the following command:

kubectl get svc -n demo --watch

When you see basic-tidb appear, the service is ready to access. You can use Ctrl+C to stop the process.

To connect to TiDB within the Kubernetes cluster, you can establish a tunnel between the TiDB service and your Cloud Shell. This is recommended only for debugging purposes, because the tunnel will not automatically be transferred if your Cloud Shell restarts. To establish a tunnel:

kubectl -n demo port-forward svc/basic-tidb 4000:4000 &>/tmp/pf4000.log &

From your Cloud Shell:

sudo apt-get install -y mysql-client && \
mysql -h 127.0.0.1 -u root -P 4000

Try out a MySQL command inside your MySQL terminal:

select tidb_version();

If you did not specify a password during installation, set one now:

SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'%' = '<change-to-your-password>';

Congratulations, you are now up and running with a distributed TiDB database compatible with MySQL!

Scale out the TiDB cluster

To scale out the TiDB cluster, modify spec.pd.replicas, spec.tidb.replicas, and spec.tikv.replicas in the TidbCluster object of the cluster to your desired value using kubectl.

kubectl -n demo edit tc basic

Access the Grafana dashboard

To access the Grafana dashboards, you can forward a port from the Cloud Shell to the Grafana service in Kubernetes. (Cloud Shell already uses port 3000 so we use port 8080 in this example instead.)

To do so, use the following command:

kubectl -n demo port-forward svc/basic-grafana 8080:3000 &>/tmp/pf8080.log &

Open this URL to view the Grafana dashboard: https://ssh.cloud.google.com/devshell/proxy?port=8080 . (Alternatively, in Cloud Shell, click the Web Preview button on the upper right corner and change the port to 8080 if necessary. If not using Cloud Shell, point a browser to localhost:8080.

The default username and password are both "admin".

Destroy the TiDB cluster

To destroy a TiDB cluster in Kubernetes, run the following command:

kubectl delete tc basic -n demo

To destroy the monitoring component, run the following command:

kubectl delete tidbmonitor basic -n demo

The above commands only delete the running pods, the data is persistent. If you do not need the data anymore, you should run the following commands to clean the data and the dynamically created persistent disks:

kubectl delete pvc -n demo -l app.kubernetes.io/instance=basic,app.kubernetes.io/managed-by=tidb-operator && \
kubectl get pv -l app.kubernetes.io/namespace=demo,app.kubernetes.io/managed-by=tidb-operator,app.kubernetes.io/instance=basic -o name | xargs -I {} kubectl patch {} -p '{"spec":{"persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy":"Delete"}}'

Shut down the Kubernetes cluster

Once you have finished experimenting, you can delete the Kubernetes cluster:

gcloud container clusters delete tidb
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