Introduction

In this section, you can find several examples of how to deploy NATS, NATS Streaming and other tools from the NATS ecosystem on Kubernetes.

• Getting Started
• Basic NATS and NATS Streaming Setup on k8s
• Deploying NATS with Helm
• Creating a NATS Streaming Cluster in k8s with FT mode
• NATS + Cert Manager in k8s
• Securing a NATS Cluster using cfssl

Running NATS on K8S

Getting started

The fastest and easiest way to get started is with just one shell command:

curl -sSL https://nats-io.github.io/k8s/setup.sh | sh

In case you don’t have a cluster already, you can find some notes on how to create a small cluster using one of the hosted Kubernetes providers here.

This will run a nats-setup container with the required policy and deploy a NATS cluster on Kubernetes with external access, TLS and decentralized authorization.

By default, the installer will deploy the Prometheus Operator and the Cert Manager for metrics and TLS support, and the NATS instances will also bind the 4222 host port for external access.

You can customize the installer to install without TLS or without Auth to have a simpler setup as follows:

# Disable TLS
curl -sSL https://nats-io.github.io/k8s/setup.sh | sh -s -- --without-tls
# Disable Auth and TLS (also disables NATS surveyor and NATS Streaming)
curl -sSL https://nats-io.github.io/k8s/setup.sh | sh -s -- --without-tls --without-auth

Note: Since NATS Streaming will be running as a leafnode to NATS (under the STAN account) and that NATS Surveyor requires the system account to monitor events, disabling auth also means that NATS Streaming and NATS Surveyor based monitoring will be disabled.

The monitoring dashboard setup using NATS Surveyor can be accessed by using port-forward:

kubectl port-forward deployments/nats-surveyor-grafana 3000:3000

Next, open the following URL in your browser:

http://127.0.0.1:3000/d/nats/nats-surveyor?refresh=5s&orgId=1