Getting Started with NRP Nautilus

Get access and log in

If you are a new user and want to access the NRP Nautilus cluster, follow the steps below.

1. Point your browser to the PRP Nautilus portal.

2. On the portal page, click on the Log In button at the top right corner.

3. You will be redirected to the CILogon page, where you have to Select an Identity Provider.

4. Select your institution (for example: University Name) from the menu and click the Log On button.

   • If your institution is using CILogon as a federated certification authority, it will be on the menu. Select the name of your institution and use either a personal account or an institutional G-suite account. This is usually your institutional account name (email) and a password associated with it.
   • If your institution is not using CILogon, you can select Google.

5. After a successful authentication, you will log in to the portal and your account will be created if it was not created before.

6. If you are a student, please contact your research supervisor and ask them to add you to their namespace. Once you are added to a namespace, your status will change to a cluster user and you will get access to all namespace resources.

7. If you are a faculty member, researcher, or postdoc starting a new project and need your own namespace — either for yourself or your research group — you can request to be promoted to a namespace admin in Matrix. As an admin, you will have the ability to:

   • Create multiple namespaces.
   • Invite other users to your namespace(s).

   We’re handling the namespaces management as a hierarchical model where we delegate the management of certain parts to the admins who can then further delegate the responsibilities..

   With your request to become an admin, please let us know your current affiliation and where you see yourself fitting in this structure. You can simply own a single namespace under your university branch for small experiments or manage multiple different namespaces for large departments or groups of students.

   Read more

8. Access your namespace(s).

   • If you have become a namespace admin, you can start creating your own namespaces at this time by going to the Namespaces manager section on the portal. You can add other users on the same page after they have logged in to the portal.
   • If you got added to a namespace as a user, you can verify it by going to the Namespaces manager tab after logging in to the portal. The namespaces you’re a member of will be marked in bold.

9. Make sure you read the cluster policies before starting to use it.

Get access and log in (deprecated)

Cluster access via kubectl

1. Install the Kubernetes command-line tool, kubectl.

2. Install the kubelogin plugin

3. Save the config file as config (without any extension) and put it in your $HOME/.kube folder.

   This folder may not exist on your machine, to create it execute:

   mkdir ~/.kube

   Finally, you should have the Nautilus Kubernetes config on your machine (laptop, desktop) as ~/.kube/config

4. Make sure you are using the correct config file.

   • Run the following command to list available Kubernetes contexts:

     $ kubectl config get-contexts
     CURRENT   NAME       CLUSTER    AUTHINFO   NAMESPACE
     *         nautilus   nautilus   oidc

   • If you have access to multiple Kubernetes clusters, you need to choose use-context nautilus by doing

     kubectl config use-context nautilus

5. Issue the kubectl command. It will authenticate via CiLogon by opening the browser window, and close one in the end.

   kubectl get nodes

6. Verify cluster access using kubectl. Run the following command on your terminal.

   kubectl get pods -n <YOUR_NAMESPACE>

   If you see the message “No resources found in your namespace” it means there are no pods in your namespace yet. This indicates that you have access to the resources of your namespace.

7. If you know you’re a member of a namespace, you can set it as default.

   kubectl config set contexts.nautilus.namespace <YOUR NAMESPACE>

Use the Cluster

1. Read the Using Nautilus page to learn how to use the cluster.

2. To learn more about Kubernetes you can look at our tutorial.

3. Other helpful resources:

   • kubectl Tool Overview and Cheatsheet
   • Kubernetes Basics from Kubernetes project
   • Kubernetes Official Tutorials

   Please note that not all examples will work in our cluster because of security policies. You are limited to seeing what’s happening in your own namespace, and nobody else can see your running pods.

GUI tools for Kubernetes

You might want to try one of these GUI tools for Kubernetes:

• Lens - Graphical user interface
• K9s - console graphical user interface

Both will use your config file in the default location to get access to the cluster.