werf is designed to glue together Git, Docker, Helm, and Kubernetes. It is meant to be used in CI/CD pipelines. Let’s see whether it can be helpful to manage our k8s applications.
Continue readingCan we get rid of the part of CI/CD pipelines that are modifying GitOps manifests repositories with new releases? Can we use Argo CD Image Updater to streamline part of our processes?
Continue readingKoncrete is cloud-hosted GitOps and continuous delivery (CD) service for Kubernetes built on top of Argo CD. It is effectively, ArgoCD-as-a-Service or GitOps-as-a-Service type of solution.
Continue readingChat is continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), continuous deployment (CDP), and continuous testing (CT)? How do they differ from each other? Which one should we use?
Continue readingWhat do we get if we combine events, workflows, GitOps, progressive delivery, and secrets management? The short answer is that we get automation of everything in Kubernetes in a way that we should be operating in 2021.
We’ll combine Argo Events, Workflows & Pipelines, CD, and Rollouts and sprinkle all that with SealedSecrets, Kaniko, and a few other tools.
Argo Workflows & Pipelines is an open source container-native workflow engine for orchestrating parallel jobs on Kubernetes. It is a cloud-native solution designed from ground-up for Kubernetes.
Progressive delivery (blue-green, rolling updates, canaries, etc.) is a set of deployment practices that aim at rolling out new features gradually.
Release frequency keeps increasing and, with it, the need to get away from static environments like staging, integration, and other permanent setups. Dynamic environments based on pull requests are probably the best example of a need for a much higher level of dynamism. Kubernetes allows us to easily create whatever we need, and destroy what is not in use. There is no need for anything, especially not environments to be permanent, except for production. We can get far in that direction by combining GitOps practices and Argo CD in a way that each pull request (PR) creates a new environment that is destroyed when a PR is closed. By doing that, we can improve efficiency while, at the same time, reducing the costs.
Since the increase in popularity of continuous delivery (CD), there was an increase in the number of tools marketed as CD solutions. That’s normal. It is only natural for software vendors to ride the waves. They need to sell, and there’s nothing better to sell than whatever is popular at a given moment. Continuous delivery is one of those "popular" waves.
A video version of the same post is available in The DevOps Toolkit Series YouTube channel.
On the surface, there is nothing wrong with buying tools that solve problems. You have a problem, a vendor has a solution, you buy it, they earn money, and you have a good return on investment. Everybody wins, except when the tool does not do what it’s supposed to do. That’s when we run into issues.
The video below is a clip from the "Canary Deployments To Kubernetes Using Istio and Friends" course in Udemy. It provides the introduction to the course we released in December 2019. Additional preview clips are available inside the course. Please use the coupons with discounts provided below.
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Welcome to practical guide to canary deployments. Unlike some other work that I did…tutorials, workshops, and so on and so forth, that were very focused on a single tool, this time I will focus more on a process.
We’re going to try to figure out how to do canary deployments inside of Kubernetes. Because Kubernetes is everywhere now, I will assume that you are using Kubernetes. But outside of that, we are going to try to figure out which tools to use, but all serving as the process itself, not for the sake of learning a specific tool. And during that process, we are going to decide which tools to use and why to use them and the end result will be a fully operational canary deployments process that you will be able to plug into any CI/CD tool or any tool that orchestrates the lifecycle of your application.
So we will definitely choose some tools that we will use in a process.
And those tools will be revolving around Istio. I will explain why Istio a bit later.
So we will use Kubernetes and Istio for canary deployments, but the end result will be agnostic to the tool that will orchestrate your processes. We will most likely also have to choose one or two additional tools. Which tools we’ll choose is yet to be discovered.
For now just think of this as being a practical guide to a specific process. And that process today is canary deployments in Kubernetes.
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