Skip to main content

Budibase on GKE Autopilot — Lab Guide

📖 Configuration Guide

Overview​

Estimated time: 45–90 minutes

Budibase is an open-source low-code platform for building internal tools, business apps, and workflows on top of your data. The official image is an all-in-one container that bundles CouchDB, MinIO, and Redis alongside the Budibase apps/worker/proxy, so this module needs no external managed database — on GKE, all of that state persists to a block Persistent Disk. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the Budibase on GKE Autopilot module on Google Cloud: deploy it, access and verify it, run it day-to-day, observe it, diagnose common problems, and tear it down.

The lab focuses on operating the GKE module and the Google Cloud platform, not on Budibase product features. For the complete list of provisioned services and every configuration input (organised by group), see the Configuration Guide — this lab deliberately does not duplicate that detail so it stays accurate over time.

Objectives​

By the end of this lab you will be able to:

  • Deploy the module from the RAD platform and locate the resources it provisions.
  • Connect to the GKE cluster, find the workload's namespace, and access the running service.
  • Perform day-2 operations — inspect the StatefulSet and PVC, understand why scaling is fixed at a single replica, update the version, and manage secrets.
  • Observe the workload with Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring.
  • Diagnose and resolve the most common deployment and runtime issues.
  • Tear the deployment down cleanly.

Prerequisites​

  • Services_GCP deployed in the target project (provides the VPC, GKE Autopilot cluster, Artifact Registry, and shared service accounts this module depends on).
  • A Google Cloud project with billing enabled.
  • gcloud CLI and kubectl installed; gcloud auth login and gcloud auth application-default login completed.
  • Project Owner (or equivalent) IAM on the project.
  • RAD platform access with permission to deploy modules into the project.

Set these shell variables once; every task below reuses them:

export PROJECT="<your-gcp-project-id>"
export REGION="us-central1"           # the region you deploy into

Task 1 — Deploy the module [Automated]​

  1. Click Deploy in the RAD platform top navigation, open Budibase (GKE) from the Platform Modules list to start configuration, set project_id, and review the inputs. Configure only what you need — the Configuration Guide documents every input by group, with defaults. Review the estimated cost (if credits are enabled) and click Deploy, which opens the deployment status page with real-time logs.

  2. The platform builds a thin pass-through wrapper image (FROM budibase/budibase) and mirrors it into Artifact Registry, then deploys a single-replica StatefulSet into the GKE Autopilot cluster (stateful_pvc_enabled = true auto-resolves workload_type to StatefulSet) with a 20Gi block Persistent Disk mounted at /data, a Cloud Storage data bucket, an external LoadBalancer Service, and seven internal-credential secrets in Secret Manager (INTERNAL_API_KEY, JWT_SECRET, MINIO_ACCESS_KEY, MINIO_SECRET_KEY, API_ENCRYPTION_KEY, REDIS_PASSWORD, COUCH_DB_PASSWORD). There is no Cloud SQL instance and no database-initialisation job — Budibase self-provisions its bundled CouchDB and MinIO on first boot onto the PVC. First deploys take roughly 15–25 minutes.

  3. Connect to the cluster and discover the namespace with a name-agnostic filter:

    CLUSTER=$(gcloud container clusters list --project="$PROJECT" --format="value(name)" --limit=1)
    gcloud container clusters get-credentials "$CLUSTER" --region="$REGION" --project="$PROJECT"

    NS=$(kubectl get ns -o name | grep budibase | head -1 | cut -d/ -f2)
    echo "Cluster: $CLUSTER   Namespace: $NS"
    kubectl get statefulset,pods,svc,pvc -n "$NS"

Task 2 — Access & verify [Manual]​

  1. Confirm the pod is running and find its external address:

    kubectl get statefulset,pods,svc -n "$NS"
    EXTERNAL_IP=$(kubectl get svc -n "$NS" \
      -o jsonpath='{.items[?(@.spec.type=="LoadBalancer")].status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}')
    echo "External IP: $EXTERNAL_IP"

  2. The startup and liveness probes target the unauthenticated root /, which returns 200 once the bundled CouchDB, MinIO, Redis, and app tier are all up. Allow up to roughly 8–9 minutes on first boot (a 60-second initial delay plus a 30-retry window at a 15-second period):

    curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' "http://${EXTERNAL_IP}/"   # expect 200

  3. Open http://${EXTERNAL_IP} in a browser. Budibase self-hosted ships with no default admin account — the setup screen prompts you to create the initial administrator (email + password). Do this immediately after deploy; until an admin is claimed, anyone who reaches the URL can claim the instance.

Task 3 — Operate & keep it running (Day-2) [Manual]​

  1. Inspect the workload — StatefulSet, pod, PVC, and events:

    kubectl get statefulset,pods,pvc -n "$NS"
    kubectl describe pod -n "$NS" -l app="$(kubectl get statefulset -n "$NS" -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')"

  2. Confirm the /data mount is backed by the PVC, since this is what makes GKE the durable Budibase platform:

    kubectl exec -n "$NS" statefulset/<service-name> -- df -h /data

  3. Do not change scaling. min_instance_count = max_instance_count = 1 is a hard requirement, not a starting point — the all-in-one pod holds all state on its single PVC, so a second replica would not share the data store (split-brain). Leave these two inputs untouched, and never force workload_type = "Deployment" (it fails at plan time alongside stateful_pvc_enabled = true, since a Deployment cannot template per-pod PVCs).

  4. Update the application version by changing application_version in the RAD platform and applying it via Update; this rebuilds the thin wrapper image (pinned through the BUDIBASE_VERSION build ARG) and replaces the pod. The PVC and its data survive the update.

  5. Manage secrets, storage, and jobs — list them, but never rotate any of the seven auto-generated secrets after first boot; the data on the PVC is keyed with these exact values and becomes unreadable if any of them changes:

    kubectl get secrets -n "$NS"
    gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~budibase"

Task 4 — Observe: Logging & Monitoring [Manual]​

  1. Logs — from kubectl or the Logs Explorer:

    kubectl logs -n "$NS" statefulset/"$(kubectl get statefulset -n "$NS" -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')" --tail=50

    Logs Explorer filter: resource.type="k8s_container" AND resource.labels.namespace_name="<namespace>".

  2. Monitoring — open the GKE / Kubernetes dashboards and review pod CPU and memory utilisation, restart counts, and PVC disk usage (it grows with app data and attachments — size stateful_pvc_size generously). If an uptime check is enabled, review Monitoring → Uptime checks and Alerting → Policies.

Task 5 — Troubleshoot & debug [Manual]​

Durable techniques for the failure modes you are most likely to hit. These are platform-level diagnostics and do not change with Budibase releases.

  • Pod not Ready / CrashLoopBackOff: inspect events and logs. The liveness probe targets /; a pod that has not finished starting CouchDB, MinIO, Redis, and the app tier will keep failing the probe until the full first-boot window elapses. 
    kubectl describe pod -n "$NS" <pod>          # Events section shows scheduling/probe/mount errors
    kubectl logs -n "$NS" <pod> --previous       # logs from the crashed container
  • Memory pressure / OOM at startup: the bundled CouchDB + MinIO + Redis + app tier need generous memory; running below roughly 2Gi risks OOM kills during first boot. Confirm container_resources memory against the Configuration Guide's recommended sizing.
  • PVC not bound / pod stuck Pending: check kubectl describe pod events for scheduling or quota issues, and confirm the PVC has a bound status: 
    kubectl get pvc -n "$NS"
    kubectl describe pvc -n "$NS" <pvc-name>
  • No external IP: confirm the LoadBalancer Service has an assigned IP; this can take a few minutes after the Service is created: 
    kubectl get svc -n "$NS" -o wide
  • No admin / unclaimed instance: if you did not create the administrator account immediately after first access, anyone reaching the external IP can still claim it — check whether an unexpected admin account already exists.
  • Image pull errors: confirm the image exists in Artifact Registry and the node service account can pull it.

See the Configuration Guide's Configuration Pitfalls section for setting-specific gotchas (including the critical rule never to rotate any of the seven auto-generated internal credentials after first boot, and why stateful_pvc_enabled must stay true).

Task 6 — Tear down [Automated]​

On the Deployments page, open the deployment and click the Trash icon (Delete). Delete runs terraform destroy and is irreversible (the deployment record is retained for history). If a deployment is stuck and the RAD platform can no longer manage it (for example after manual changes that conflict with the Terraform state), use Purge instead — it removes the deployment from RAD's records without destroying the cloud resources (it makes RAD forget the project). This removes everything the module created — the Kubernetes StatefulSet and namespace, the block PVC and its data, Secret Manager secrets, GCS bucket, and Artifact Registry images. Resources owned by Services_GCP (the VPC, GKE cluster, shared registry) are managed separately and are not removed here.

Summary​

TaskTypeOutcome
1 — DeployAutomatedModule builds a thin wrapper image and deploys a single-replica StatefulSet with a 20Gi PVC on /data, a GCS bucket, a LoadBalancer Service, and seven internal-credential secrets — no Cloud SQL
2 — Access & verifyManualConnect to the cluster; HTTP / returns 200; create the initial admin account in the UI
3 — OperateManualInspect the StatefulSet/PVC, keep scaling fixed at 1/1, update version, manage secrets (never rotate)
4 — ObserveManualQuery Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics, PVC disk usage, and uptime check
5 — TroubleshootManualDiagnose pod, PVC, scheduling, and image-pull issues
6 — Tear downAutomatedDelete (Trash) removes all module resources, including the PVC and its persisted data

By · Google Cloud certified: ACE · PCA · PCD · PDE · PSE · CDL

Last updated on