[Request] Document Fleet Server start up in Fleet or k8s quick-start guides

[EricDavisX]

Description

When we added Fleet Server with 7.13 release, we didn't initially appreciate (in my team) that it was more of a stack component than just a part of Agent (on the edge) or Fleet (in Kibana). We need to prioritize adding start up commands for Fleet Server anywhere it can be started (self managed, Cloud, ECE, ECK) - this ticket is about k8s / ECK.

(Describe what needs to be documented. Link to relevant issues.)
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/cloud-on-k8s/master/k8s-quickstart.html
I checked here, and I think customers would expect this to have a 'Fleet Server' topic listed, as it has one for Elasticsearch and one for Kibana.

Collaboration

Should this go to a different team (who covers ECK, overall) or no?

• The docs team will lead producing the content
• The product team will provide the initial content and the docs team will edit / review
• The docs team will define with product team the structure and location, and the product team will provide the initial content
• Other (please describe)

Contact Person:
@jlind23

Suggested Target Release

7.16

Stakeholders

Security Team, O11y Team, customers who use ECK / K8s

Notes

I do see the overall 'Fleet Architecture' docs ticket here:
https://github.com/elastic/ingest-docs/issues/127
which references k8s briefly, but I don't think it had intentions to fully document how to start up the Fleet Server in a k8s pod / cluster, which is what this ticket is about.

[EricDavisX]

@dedemorton what do you think about who/where this should be covered? And is there any chance to prioritize it?

[dedemorton]

@EricDavisX A couple questions:

• When you say "start up" commands for Fleet Server, do you mean how to set up and run Fleet Server?
• Is this issue meant to track requirements for the ECK and ECE docs? If so, it needs to be transferred to the cloud repo because we don't handle those docs. I wouldn't know where to begin.

The obs-docs team does "own" the K8s documentation in the Fleet/Agent guide and we can update it, but the development team wrote the original docs, and I personally haven't even gone through the steps.

We will need more detail about what is required to run Fleet Server on K8s (assuming this is what you are asking about). @MichaelKatsoulis Can you help us with that? Shouldn't we ship a sample deployment manifest for that?

[akshay-saraswat]

I believe @nimarezainia and @blakerouse are the subject matter experts in this area and would be able to answer if we should ship a sample deployment manifest or not.

cc: @mostlyjason

[EricDavisX]

@dedemorton and @akshay-saraswat hi. Dede, yes, I meant how to setup and run Fleet Server. The issue is intended to cover Kubernetes usage. I don't know if that solely means ECK or not - I'm not a SME, admittedly and ECK is even less discussed in the circles I'm in than ECE is, so I'm looking to bring in folks that know our intentions to support and document it and figure out where. Is ECK part of cloud team's ownership?

It is clearly cross-team to get this done! Thanks to everyone for hepling push it along. We'll need the details of how to run it (which I don't know or have confirmed). I do think a sample could work well. Blake is out for a bit, fyi. @nimarezainia , I'd like to ship a sample. :) Do you want to?

[dedemorton]

I think this issue was opened before we added these docs to https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/fleet/current/running-on-kubernetes-managed-by-fleet.html. I'm not familiar with ECK and can't say whether doc changes are still required there.

I'm removing this from the obs-docs project and leaving it on the ingest-docs board for someone to triage.

[eedugon]

Deploying a Fleet Server on K8s with ECK is already covered in this doc: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/cloud-on-k8s/current/k8s-elastic-agent-fleet-quickstart.html (it didn't exist before).

We still need to explain that use case in the Fleet docs in my opinion.

[lucabelluccini]

Imho we need a more production ready documentation especially for deploying Fleet Servers on ECK when using self signed certs on ES side and on Fleet Server side, similar to what we explain at https://www.elastic.co/docs/reference/fleet/secure-connections, but for ECK

FYI @kilfoyle / @eedugon

[kilfoyle]

Thanks for the update @lucabelluccini I've added this to the Observability Docs board so that it gets triaged soon.

[eedugon]

@lucabelluccini , sorry my previous link was incorrect. The doc that was added to cover Fleet server on Kubernetes was this one:

• Deploy Fleet Server on Kubernetes --> That doc should be production ready. The methodology to deploy is for the moment static manifests, but hopefully we will have a Helm chart too for a smooth experience (discussion here).

• On ECK docs we have some examples to install Fleet on K8s managed by ECK, but we don't have a good narrative explaining it, maybe we can improve that. Also we could improve giving extra visibility to the Fleet Server besides Elastic Agent.

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