Run Oracle XE Docker Container on Amazon EKS

Recently Amazon announced general availability of their new service Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS). This is a managed service to deploy, manage and scale containerized applications using K8s on AWS. I decided to get my hands dirty with it and deployed a Docker container with Oracle XE Database to a K8s cluster on Amazon EKS. In this post I am going to describe what I did to make that happen.

1. Create Oracle XE Docker image.

First of all we need a Docker image with Oracle XE database:

1.1 Clone Oracle GitHub repository to build docker images:

git clone https://github.com/oracle/docker-images.git oracle-docker-images

It will create oracle-docker-images folder.

1.2 Download Oracle XE binaries from OTN

1.3 Copy the downloaded stuff to ../oracle-docker-images/OracleDatabase/SingleInstance/dockerfiles/11.2.0.2 folder

1.4 Build the Docker image

./buildDockerImage.sh -v 11.2.0.2 -x -I

1.5 Check the new image

docker images oracle/database:11.2.0.2-xe

1.6. Rename the image so you can push it to Docker Hub. E.g.:

docker tag oracle/database:11.2.0.2-xe eugeneflexagon/database:11.2.0.2-xe

Ok, so having done that, we have Oracle XE Docker image stored in Docker Hub repository.

2. Create K8s cluster on Amazon EKS.

Assuming that you have already AWS account, take your favorite tambourine (you will need it) and create a K8s cluster following this guide Getting Started with Amazon EKS (a good example of how complicated you can make a "getting started guide").

Once you are able to see your working nodes in Ready status, you're good to move forward

kubectl get nodes --watch

3. Configure Load Balancer

In AWS console go to your EC2 Dashboard and look at the Load Balancers tab:

Click on Create Load Balancer, select Network Load Balancer:

change the listener port to 1521

and specify in Availability Zones the VPC that you have just created for the K8s cluster:

The scheme should be internet-facing.

4. Deploy Oracle XE Docker container to the K8s cluster.

4.1 Create a yaml file with the following content:

apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: oraclexe
  labels:
    run: oraclexe
spec:
  replicas: 1
  strategy:
    rollingUpdate:
      maxSurge: 1
      maxUnavailable: 1
    type: RollingUpdate
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        run: oraclexe
    spec:   
     volumes:
       - name: dshm
         emptyDir:
           medium: Memory
     containers:
       - image: eugeneflexagon/database:11.2.0.2-xe
         volumeMounts:
           - mountPath: /dev/shm
             name: dshm
         imagePullPolicy: Always
         name: oraclexe
         ports:
           - containerPort: 1521
             protocol: TCP
     imagePullSecrets:
       - name: wrelease
     restartPolicy: Always
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: oraclexe-svc
spec:
  selector:
    run: oraclexe
  ports:
    - port: 1521
      targetPort: 1521
  type: LoadBalancer

4.2  Deploy it:

kubectl apply -f oraclexe-deployment.yaml

5. Check how it works

5.1. Get a list of pods and check the logs:

kubectl get pods

kubectl logs -f POD_NAME

Once you see in the logs DATABASE IS READY TO USE! the database container is up and running.

Note, that the container while starting generated a password for sys and system users. You can find this password in the log:

5.2 Get external IP address of the service:

kubectl get svc

Wait until the address in EXTERNAL-IP column turns from PENDING into something meaningful:

5.3 Connect to the DB:

That's it!