Turandot Tutorial: Hello World

Note that this tutorial is intentionally simplified in that it does not support CSAR packages that include container images as artifacts. That feature is more complex to set up and is covered in a more advanced tutorial.

Start by cloning the Turandot git repository so that you’ll have access to all the example files and helper scripts:

git clone https://github.com/tliron/turandot.git
cd turandot

If you prefer to read code rather than prose, check out the lab/ directory, where we have scripts that do much of what is explained here.



Download the binary release of Turandot. Specifically you’ll need the turandot CLI utility (it’s a self-contained executable).

We’ll also need the puccini-csar CLI utility from Puccini in order to package our CSAR. It’s generally useful to have Puccini available in order to validate and otherwise work with your TOSCA and CSAR.

A few other tools used by the scripts: zip, zipinfo, tar.

Kubernetes Cluster

To get started with Turandot you need kubectl access to a working Kubernetes cluster.

For development work, Minikube is a quick way to get started. Just make sure to start Minikube with its registry add-on enabled:

minikube start --addons=registry ...

The turandot utility uses the same local configuration you have for kubectl, and like kubectl they can accept a --namespace argument for selecting the namespace in which to work. To make commands more succinct in this guide let’s set a default namespace:

kubectl create namespace workspace
kubectl config set-context --current --namespace=workspace

Installing the Operator

Here we’re giving this cluster the “central” site identifier. This will be used for multi-cluster policy-based TOSCA service composition:

turandot operator install --site=central --wait -v

Note the operator’s container image is downloaded from Docker Hub. Here is a direct link.

The --wait flag tells the command to block until the operator is running successfully. The -v flag adds more verbosity so you can see what the command is doing. (You can use -vv for even more verbosity.)

Building the “Hello World” CSAR

Let’s use the included Hello World example, which is based on this Kubernetes demo.

You’ll use the build-csar script to package the TOSCA topology template, profiles, and artifacts into a CSAR:


The CSAR file should now sit in the “dist” directory.

Deploying “Hello World”

You can now deploy the CSAR to your cluster:

turandot service deploy hello-world --file=dist/hello-world.csar -v

Follow the logs to see what Turandot is doing:

turandot operator logs --follow

To list all deployed services:

turandot service list

Note that the “Hello World” example includes a LoadBalancer Kubernetes service that would allow you to access its web page from outside the cluster. If your cluster is not configured with LoadBalancer support then, even when successfully deployed, the service will never get an IP address, and the TOSCA “url” output for your “Hello World” service will show http://<unknown>:80.

If you’re using Minikube, it comes with a primitive ingress solution based on ssh tunneling that can be useful for testing. To run it (it’s blocking, so you might want to do it in a separate terminal session):

minikube tunnel

Once the tunnel is up, the LoadBalancer should get its IP address, and Turandot would soon update the “url” output with the correct URL. You can then use curl or a web browser to access it:

xdg-open $(turandot service output hello-world url)