Mattermost Elrond

This repository houses the open-source components of Mattermost Elrond service. With its name inspired by the famous Council of Elrond from the famous LOTR books that defined the fate of the Ring, this service will be used to manage and support ring-based deployments in Mattermost Cloud.

Other Resources

This repository houses the open-source components of Mattermost Elrond. Other resources are linked below:

• Mattermost Cloud

Get Involved

• Join the discussion on Mattermost Cloud

Developing

Environment Setup

Required Software

The following is required to properly run the elrond server.

Note: when versions are specified, it is extremely important to follow the requirement. Newer versions will often not work as expected

1. Install Go
2. Install and run local Mattermost Cloud server

Building

Simply run the following:

go install ./cmd/elrond
alias elrond='$HOME/go/bin/elrond'

Running

Before running the server the first time you must set up the DB with:

$ elrond schema migrate

Run the server with:

elrond server

tip: if you want to use a remote running Mattermost Cloud server pass the --provisioner-server flag

Grafana Integration

In case you want to integrate Elrond with Grafana, Elrond supports creation of Grafana annotations covering start and finish of an ring release. You can enable the feature by passing --grafana-token and --grafana-url flags. You can pass multiple --grafana-token flags to add annotations in multiple Grafana orgs.

Ring

The ring reflects a group of Installation Groups that have a similar release purpose. Therefore a ring can have many registered Installation Groups. A number of registered installation groups higher than 1 can help to achieve canary releases.

In a different terminal/window, to create a ring:

elrond ring create --name <ring-name> --priority <ring-priority> --version <cloud-image-version> --image <cloud-image>
i.e.
elrond ring create --name ring-1 --priority 1 --version test-1234 --image mattermost/mattermost-enterprise-edition

tip: You can register a Mattermost Installation group in the ring creation step. You can run elrond ring create --help to see more configuration options.

Installation Group

The installation group reflects a group of Mattermost installations. Each ring can have multiple registered installation groups and each installation group should reflect a real Mattermost Cloud (provisioner) installation group.

In a different terminal/window, to register an installation group:

elrond ring installation-group register --installation-group-name "<installation-group-name>" --provisioner-group-id "<mattermost-cloud-installation-group-id>" --ring "<ring-id>" --soak-time "<installation-group-soak-time>"
i.e
elrond ring installation-group register --installation-group-name "ig-1" --provisioner-group-id "test12345" --ring "test123456" --soak-time 60

Testing

Run the go tests to test:

$ go test ./...

Deleting a ring and installation groups

To deregister an installation group from a ring first check the IGs registered:

elrond ring list
[
    {
        "ID": "123456789",
        "Name": "ring-1",
        "Priority": 2,
        "SoakTime": 60,
        "State": "stable",
        "Provisioner": "elrond",
        "ActiveReleaseID": "123456789",
        "DesiredReleaseID": "123456789",
        "CreateAt": 1659706964202,
        "DeleteAt": 0,
        "ReleaseAt": 1659954915507099000,
        "installationGroups": [
            {
                "id": "123456789",
                "name": "ig-1",
                "state": "stable",
                "releaseAt": 1659954825485290000,
                "soakTime": 60,
                "provisionerGroupID": "123456789",
                "LockAcquiredBy": null,
                "LockAcquiredAt": 0
            }
        ],
        "APISecurityLock": false,
        "LockAcquiredBy": null,
        "LockAcquiredAt": 0
    }
]

Get the ID and delete it:

elrond ring installation-group delete --installation-group "<installation-group-id" --ring "<ring-id>"
i.e.
elrond ring installation-group delete --installation-group "123456789" --ring "123456789"

To delete a ring:

elrond ring delete --ring "<ring-id>"

Releasing a ring

To release a new Mattermost version to a ring you can use the following command

elrond ring release --image "<mattermost-image>" --version "<mattermost-image-version>" --ring "<ring-id>"
i.e.
elrond ring release --image mattermost/mattermost-enterprise-edition --version version-2 --ring "123456789"

If you want to relase to all rings with a single command you can run

elrond ring release --image "<mattermost-image>" --version "<mattermost-image-version>" --all-rings

The Elrond will follow the priority numbers and release first the ring with the lowest priority number. Then after the soak time has passed it will move to the next ring based on priority.

Elrond supports Mattermost Provisioner group environment variable changes. You can perform a ring release with same or new Mattermost version and change environment variables as well passing the flag as shown below:

elrond ring release --image "<mattermost-image>" --version "<mattermost-image-version>" --ring "<ring-id>" --env-variable "<ENV_VARIABLE_NAME:ENV_VARIABLE_VALUE>" --env-variable "<ENV_VARIABLE_NAME:ENV_VARIABLE_VALUE>"
i.e.
elrond ring release --image mattermost/mattermost-enterprise-edition --version version-2 --ring "123456789" --env-variable "MM_TEST:123"

Forcing a ring release

There are cases that a force release is required for example for an urgent bug fix or security patch. When a force flag is passed the soak times are ignored and the release process will be a lot faster.

To force a release you can run

elrond ring release --image "<mattermost-image>" --version "<mattermost-image-version>" --all-rings --force