A Blueprint for building a DBaaS for an Internal Developer Platform

(demo for MDB.local NYC 2023)

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Prerequisites

1. A running Kubernetes cluster

2. Atlas CLI installed locally (v1.7 or higher) and setup with your Atlas account

   (There are alternative ways to install the Atlas Kubernetes Operator - via Helm or Kubectl)

Step 1 - Installing the Atlas Kubernetes Operator

1. Install the operator via the Atlas cli

atlas kubernetes operator install

2. Verify installation and setup

kubectl get pods

kubectl get secrets

Step 2 [Optional] - Deploy Atlas resources manually

1. Create an AtlasProject Custom Resource

kubectl apply -f dbaas/atlas-project.yaml

2. Create an AtlasCluster Custom Resource

kubectl apply -f dbaas/atlas-mongodb-cluster.yaml

Step 3 - Deploy Atlas resources through GitOps with ArgoCD

1. Install ArgoCD

kubectl create namespace argocd

kubectl apply -n argocd -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/argoproj/argo-cd/stable/manifests/install.yaml

2. Create the Argo Application

Edit the source in gitops/argo-application.yaml to the repository, revision, and directory to be watched for dbaas file changes

  source:
    repoURL: https://github.com/giohan/dotlocaldemo.git
    targetRevision: HEAD
    path: ./dbaas/

Deploy the Application Custom Resource

kubectl apply -f gitops/argo-application.yaml

3. Create Atlas resources through the git IaC repository (these steps can be performed without cluster access)

git add dbaas/atlas-project.yaml
git commit -m 'gitops project'
git push -u origin main

git add dbaas/atlas-mongodb-cluster.yaml
git commit -m 'dev mongodb cluster'
git push -u origin main

Step 4 - Connect to the database

1. Create a secret with a password to log into the Atlas cluster

kubectl create secret generic the-user-password --from-literal="password=P@@sword%"  # change this to your password
kubectl label secret the-user-password atlas.mongodb.com/type=credentials

2. Create the user through the git IaC repository

git add dbaas/dbuser.yaml
git commit -m 'database user'
git push -u origin main

3. Retrieve the secret that Atlas Kubernetes Operator created to connect to the cluster. The secret is created with a name pattern {project}-{cluster}-{database-user}

kubectl get secret atlas-project-first-cluster-dbuser -o json | jq -r '.data | with_entries(.value |= @base64d)';

4. Use the secret as an environment variable for your deployments. Example: sample-app/hello-atlas.yaml

    env:
        - name: "MDB_CONNECTION_STRING"
        valueFrom:
            secretKeyRef:
                name: atlas-project-first-cluster-dbuser
                key: connectionStringStandardSrv